Interaction between longitudinal and transverse plasma waves

Abstract

The rate at which energy is fed into the transverse waves due to interaction with longitudinal waves is calculated for the case of an infinite, homogeneous, isotropic, collisionless plasma. The method is based on constructing the Hamiltonian for the system in terms of creation and annihilation operators of second quantization. It turns out from the Hamiltonian that the dominate mechanism is the one in which two longitudinal waves collide to yield one transverse wave. Thus, in general, the energy transfer rate decreases with time. In a special case the results agree with the previous work (Aamodt and Drummond 1964).