The Dielectric Response of Plasmas with Arbitrary Gyrotropic Velocity Distributions

2025/06/19 by Klein, Kristopher, Verscharen, Daniel · 3 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Dust and Plasma Wave Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #Ionosphere and magnetosphere dynamics #Plasma Diagnostics and Applications #Plasma Physics (physics.plasm-ph)

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.16431

openalex publication_date 2025/06/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Hot and tenuous plasmas are frequently far from local thermodynamic equilibrium, necessitating sophisticated methods for determining the associated plasma dielectric tensor and normal mode response. The Arbitrary Linear Plasma Solver (alps) is a numerical tool for calculating such responses of plasmas with arbitrary gyrotropic background velocity distribution functions (VDFs). In order to model weakly and moderately damped plasma waves accurately, we have updated to the code to use an improved analytic continuation enabled by a polynomial basis representation. We demonstrate the continuity of solutions to the linear Vlasov--Maxwell dispersion relation between bi-Maxwellian and arbitrary VDF representations and evaluate the influence of VDF structure on mode polarization and wave power emission and absorption.

Citations

• Ion Beam Instabilities during Solar Flare Energy Release
• Extreme heating of minor ions in imbalanced solar-wind turbulence
• Estimated Heating Rates Due to Cyclotron Damping of Ion-scale Waves Observed by Parker Solar Probe
• Velocity Space Signatures of Resonant Energy Transfer between Whistler Waves and Electrons in the Earth's Magnetosheath
• Proton and Alpha Driven Instabilities in an Ion Cyclotron Wave Event
• The Effects of Non-Equilibrium Velocity Distributions on Alfvén Ion-Cyclotron Waves in the Solar Wind
• Velocity Space Diffusion from Weak Plasma Turbulence in a Magnetic Field

Cited by

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• BO-PBK: A comprehensive solver for dispersion relations of obliquely propagating waves in magnetized multi-species plasma with anisotropic loss-cone drift product-bi-kappa distribution

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