A plasma dissipation formalism

Abstract

A formalism for treating dissipation arising from “frictional” interactions in plasmas was introduced byBurman, Byrne andBuckingham (1976), and was later extended (Burman 1977) to plasmas in which the species can have relativistic streaming velocities. The purpose of this paper is to see how far the theory can be developed with the “frictional” forces between the species left unspecified. The number of species is arbitrary, charge neutrality is not required and the plasmas can be fully or partially ionized. Inertial and pressure gradient effects are fully incorporated. Applications of the formalism to the description of ambipolar diffusion and to the description of plasma heating in terms of apparent conductivities are developed. Flux conservation, magnetohydrodynamic and force-free approximations are discussed. Detailed results are given for binary plasmas, with particular attention paid to the analysis of inertial effects; some remarks are made on the relevance of the results to pulsar magnetospheres.