Landau Damping of Electrostatic Waves in Arbitrarily Degenerate Quantum Plasmas

Abstract

We carry out a systematic study of the dispersion relation for linear electrostatic waves in an arbitrarily degenerate quantum electron plasma. We solve for the complex frequency spectrum for arbitrary values of wavenumber $k$ and level of degeneracy $\mu$. Our finding is that for large $k$ and high $\mu$ the real part of the frequency ${\omega }_r$ grows linearly with $k$ and scales with $\mu$ only because of the scaling of the Fermi energy. In this regime the relative Landau damping rate $\gamma /{\omega }_r$ becomes independent of $k$ and varies inversly with $\mu$. Thus, damping is weak but finite at moderate levels of degeneracy for short wavelengths.

5 pages, 2 figures, replaced with the final version accepted for publication in Physics of Plasmas Letters

References in corpus (3)

• New Quantum Limits in Plasmonic Devices
• Solid state plasmas
• Surface plasmon polaritons in a semi-bounded degenerate plasma: role of spatial dispersion and collisions

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Wave-particle interactions in quantum plasmas
• Quantum kinetic theories in degenerate plasmas
• Nonlinear Landau damping of wave envelopes in a quantum plasma
• Effects of Landau damping on ion-acoustic solitary waves in a semiclassical plasma
• Effects of group velocity and multi-plasmon resonances on the modulation of Langmuir waves in a degenerate plasma
• Nonlinear wave damping due to multi-plasmon resonances
• Analytical Properties of Linear Electrostatic Waves in Two-Component Quantum and Classical Plasmas