Fluid Models for Relativistic Warm Plasmas

Abstract

Relativistic warm plasmas are of great interest in several areas of astrophysics (e.g. stellar winds(1), pulsar magnetospheres(2), collisionless accretion onto neutron stars and black holes(3)) as well as in laboratory plasma physics(4). The models utilized for describing warm plasmas are based on a kinetic approach starting from the relativistic Vlasov — Maxwell system(4). Whereas for linear problems a kinetic approach is analytically tractable, in the non linear case one has to resort to numerical simulation. However for many problems a reduced description in terms of fluid quantities could be adequate, leading to problems which are analytically tractable. For this reason several fluid models have been introduced starting from the simplest cold fluid one (zero temperature)(4). Warm plasmas consisting of finite temperature electron beams have been modeled among others, by Toepfer (5)assuming that the electrons have a thermal distribution. More adequate models have been obtained by Siambis(6) and by Newcomb(7) by taking the moments of the relativistic Vlasov equation and truncating in an appropriate way.KeywordsBlack HoleNeutron StarMoment EquationVlasov EquationConstitutive FunctionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.