Accurate Gaunt factors for non-relativistic quadrupole bremsstrahlung
Abstract
The exact result for non-relativistic quadrupole bremsstrahlung in a Coulomb field was established only recently in Pradler & Semmelrock (2020). It requires the evaluation and integration of hypergeometric functions across a wide range of parameters and arguments, which, in practice, is unfeasible. Here we provide a highly accurate tabulation of the Gaunt factor for quadrupole radiation, its thermal average in a Maxwellian plasma, and the associated cooling function over the entire kinematically relevant range. In addition, we provide a simple approximate formula for the emission cross section which works to within a few percent accuracy for all practical purposes. The results can be applied to the scattering of electrons with themselves, for which quadrupole radiation is the dominant process.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2103.03248,
title = {Accurate Gaunt factors for non-relativistic quadrupole bremsstrahlung},
author = {Josef Pradler and Lukas Semmelrock},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.03248},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
14 pages, 5 figures, 6 tables + 10 ancillary files with machine readable versions of the tables; minor typos corrected; journal version