Abstract
The lowering of the ionization energy in a plasma is due to the interaction of all particle components. The magnitude of this effect in the Saha equation of a plasma in thermodynamic equilibrium has been treated in a number of investigations. Here we study the same problem for a plasma with different temperatures of the particle components. Each component is uniformly distributed in the configuration space and quasi-Maxwellian in the velocity space. A generalized Saha equation is derived using the methods of irreversible thermodynamics. The lowering of the ionization energy can be calculated with the help of the correlation functions. It is given in terms of particle number density and temperatures.
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