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Abstract Weakly turbulent processes that take place in plasmas are customarily formulated in terms of kinetic theory. However, owing to an inherent complexity associated with the problem, thus far the theory is fully developed largely for unmagnetized plasmas. In the present paper it is shown that a warm two fluid theory can successfully be employed in order to partially formulate the weak turbulence theory in spatially uniform plasma. Specifically, it is shown that the nonlinear wave-wave interaction, or decay processes, can be reproduced by the two-fluid formalism. The present finding shows that the same approach can in principle be extended to magnetized plasmas, which is a subject of future work.
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Polarization vector formalism of plasma weak turbulence
This paper formulates the plasma weak turbulent theory based on the unit electric field polarization vector. This concept is not intrinsically new, and partial formulations of weak turbulence processes based on the polarization vector approach are found in the literature. However, the present paper applies such a method uniformly to all the relevant processes for the first time, thus unifying the existing formalisms. The present result potentially provides many advantages including the fact that it facilitates the complex manipulations of various tensor coupling coefficients that dictate the wave–wave and nonlinear wave–particle interactions. To demonstrate its validity, the limit of unmagnetized plasmas is considered, and it is shown that the known results are recovered. The present formalism can be extended to more complex situations including magnetized plasmas, which is a subject of future work.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1842643
- PAR ID:
- 10597236
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Institute of Physics
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- AIP Advances
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 12
- ISSN:
- 2158-3226
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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