A guiding-center Fokker-Planck collision operator for nonuniform magnetic fields
Abstract
A new formulation for collisional kinetic theory is presented based on the use of Lie-transform methods to eliminate fast orbital time scales from a general bilinear collision operator. As an application of this new formalism, a general guiding-center bilinear Fokker-Planck (FP) collision operator is derived following the elimination of the fast gyromotion time scale of a charged particle moving in a nonuniform magnetic field. It is expected that classical transport processes in a strongly magnetized nonuniform plasma can, thus, be described in terms of this reduced guiding-center FP kinetic theory. The present paper introduces the reduced-collision formalism only while its applications are left to future work.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.physics/0405052,
title = {A guiding-center Fokker-Planck collision operator for nonuniform magnetic fields},
author = {Alain J. Brizard},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:physics/0405052},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
21 pages, Latex, to appear in Physics of Plasmas