2022/10/18 by S. J. Frank, J. C. Wright, Frank, S. J. +3
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Electromagnetic Simulation and Numerical Methods #FOS: Physical sciences #Magnetic confinement fusion research #Particle accelerators and beam dynamics #Plasma Physics (physics.plasm-ph)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2210.10214
openalex publication_date 2022/10/18 · openalex created_date 2022/10/22 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Treatments of plasma waves usually assume homogeneity, but the parallel gradients ubiquitous in plasmas can modify wave propagation and absorption. We derive a quasilocal inhomogeneous correction to the plasma dielectric for arbitrary distributions by expanding the phase correlation integral and develop a novel integration technique that allows our correction to be applied in many situations and has greater accuracy than other inhomogeneous dielectric formulas found in the literature. We apply this dielectric tensor to the lower-hybrid current drive problem and demonstrate that inhomogeneous wave damping does not affect the lower-hybrid wave's linear damping condition, and in the non-Maxwellian problem damping and propagation should remain unchanged except in the case of waves with very large phase velocities.