A new type of surface waves in a fully degenerate quantum plasma

Abstract

We study the response of a semi-bounded one-component fully degenerate electron plasma to an initial perturbation, in the electrostatic limit. We show that the part of the electric potential corresponding to surface waves in such plasma can be represented, at large times, as the sum of two terms, one term corresponding to “conventional” (Langmuir) surface waves and the other term representing a new type of surface waves resulting from specific analytic properties of degenerate plasma's dielectric response function. These two terms are characterized by different oscillation frequencies (for a given wave number), and while the “conventional” term's amplitude decays exponentially with time, the new term is characterized by a slower, power-law decay of the oscillation amplitude and is therefore dominant at large times.