Distribution Function of Charged Particles in a Plasma of Fusion Interest

Abstract

The non-Maxwellian distribution function of charged particles injected into a deuterium– tritium plasma has been found by Cozzani and Horton, and by Liberman and Velikovich,. They use an approximation of the collision integral in the Landau form which is valid for charged particle velocities much smaller than the plasma electron thermal velocity and much larger than plasma ion thermal velocity. If the charged particles are alpha particles generated by deuterium–tritium fusion of a plasma at temperatures in the range from 5 to 30 keV, the previous assumptions are no longer valid. In this work, the Fokker–Planck coefficients are used following the idea suggested by Gus’kov et al., but without neglecting the diffusion coefficient. A second order differential equation for the distribution function is obtained instead of a first order one of previous works. By this way, a general solution of this equation has been found which is valid for all the range of temperatures of fusion interest.