Hydrodynamic action functional and absorption of electromagnetic waves in plasma

Abstract

The path integration method is used to study the absorption of waves in plasma. The absorption is considered of longitudinal electromagnetic waves as a consequence of scattering on the transverse waves, which requires the introduction of an integration with respect to a supplementary field of the vector potential. The scattering on the transverse waves becomes the determining one for a one-component plasma in the long wavelength limit. The hydrodynamic action functional is constructed for a magnetized electron-ion plasma by the method of successive integration, first with respect to “fast” fields and, next, with respect to “slow” fields. The absorption of the longitudinal waves is computed with the aid of this functional. The domains of frequencies of the order of the plasma frequency and of the order of the cyclotron frequency are considered. In comparison with the case of a free plasma, here the Coulomb logarithm is varied.