Collisional Damping of Transverse Plasma Oscillations

The effect of Coulomb collisions on the transverse electron oscillations in a fully ionized hot plasma is studied by means of the Fokker-Planck equation. The damping coefficient for the electron-ion collisions γi turns out to be much greater than the one for the electron-electron collisions γe. To first order in electron-collision frequency, these are given by, γi = [νc/3(2π)12][ωp2/(c2k2+ωp2)]·[1+(2.075k2υ02)/(c2k2+ωp2)−k2υ02ωp2/(c2k2+ωp2)2],γe=(41/16)[νc/3π12][ωp2/(c2k2+ωp2)][k2υ02/(c2k2+ωp2)],where v0 and ωp are the electron thermal speed and the plasma frequency, respectively.