Amalgam of ideas for self-focusing of electromagnetic beam in a plasma

Abstract

Various scientists have discussed the phenomenon of self-focusing of an electromagnetic beam propagating through a plasma. These discussions have different ways and environment for looking the phenomenon, and thus, they may not be compatible with each other. Some approaches consider it as one-dimensional (in the direction of propagation) phenomenon whereas some other consider it as a three-dimensional case, using cylindrically symmetric coordinates. It is found in one discussion, three approaches have been combined without caring for their compatibility and even one expression is adopted with mistake, and a factor γ is introduced without any justification. Further, an expression for γ is taken without any justification. We have investigated the details of that work, and have found discrepancies, which may be assigned to the mis-matching in the approaches combined there. Such work may be used as a reference, and may percolate further without caring for its validity. We opine that one should refrain from such activities.