Characteristics of collective modes in anisotropic plasmas

Abstract

We use a quasi-particle picture and the hard-loop approximation to study collective modes in anisotropic plasmas. We study a general class of anisotropic distribution functions and derive and solve the dispersion equations. We focus on imaginary modes because of their potential influence on plasma dynamics, and we study their dependence on the parameters that characterize the anisotropy of the system. We show that the strength of the imaginary modes is related to the oblateness of the distribution, and the size of the azimuthal Fourier coefficients.