Plasma physics in noninertial frames

Abstract

Equations describing the nonrelativistic motion of a charged particle in an arbitrary noninertial reference frame are derived from the relativistically invariant form of the particle action. It is shown that the equations of motion can be written in the same form in inertial and noninertial frames, with the effective electric and magnetic fields in the latter modified by inertial effects associated with centrifugal and Coriolis accelerations. These modifications depend on the particle charge-to-mass ratio, and also the vorticity, specific kinetic energy, and compressibility of the frame flow. The Newton–Lorentz, Vlasov, and Fokker–Planck equations in such a frame are derived. Reduced models such as gyrokinetic, drift-kinetic, and fluid equations are then derivable from these equations in the appropriate limits, using standard averaging procedures. The results are applied to tokamak plasmas rotating about the machine symmetry axis with a nonrelativistic but otherwise arbitrary toroidal flow velocity. Astrophysical applications of the analysis are also possible since the power of the action principle is such that it can be used to describe relativistic flows in curved spacetime.