English

Collision operator for electron runaway in cold weakly-ionized plasmas

Plasma Physics 2025-09-04 v1

Abstract

In cold weakly-ionized plasmas, Dreicer generation mechanism can be non-diffusive as demonstrated in [Y. Lee et. al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 133 17 175102 (2024)]. By expanding the previous letter, we present the detailed description of a proper collision operator to precisely account for the non-diffusive electron kinetics. The operator appropriately combines the Fokker-Planck operator and Boltzmann operator where free-bound collision cross sections are valid in low energy region. The proposed operator is envisaged to predict runaway electrons generations in cold weakly-ionized plasmas, particularly to design a runaway-free reactor tokamak startup.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.03092,
  title  = {Collision operator for electron runaway in cold weakly-ionized plasmas},
  author = {Yeongsun Lee and Pavel Aleynikov and Peter de Vries and Jong-Kyu Park and Yong-Su Na},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.03092},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

This will be submitted to Journal of Plasma Physics

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:18:52.418Z