English

Unified Description of Kappa-type velocity distributions

Plasma Physics 2025-08-04 v1

Abstract

An extension of Maxwell's original prescription for an ideal gas is adopted to derive a broad class of Kappa-type velocity distributions, encompassing both fat and short-tailed forms. Within this general framework, a physically consistent fat-tailed Kappa distribution is identified that accurately fits recent suprathermal data. In particular, a kinetic physical temperature TT emerges naturally from the model, eliminating the need to invoke an effective temperature TκT_{\kappa\ell}, as is commonly done in the literature. Finally, it is argued that only a particular value of \ell ensures a satisfactory fit to the data when the physical kinetic temperature is employed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.00114,
  title  = {Unified Description of Kappa-type velocity distributions},
  author = {J. A. S. Lima and M. H. Benetti},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.00114},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

6 pages, 1 figure and 5 tables. Accepted for publication in Physical Review E