paper

Ponderomotive force of quasi-particles in a plasma

arXiv:physics/9807049 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.59.2273

Abstract

We derive the force exerted in the background plasma by an arbitrary distribution of non interacting quasi-particles, corresponding to either collective excitations of the plasma (plasmons, phonons) or em dressed particles (photons, neutrinos). Our approach is based on the effective Hamiltonian describing the quasi-classical dynamics of the individual particles in the presence of a background medium. We recover the usual results for the relativistic ponderomotive force of a photon gas, and we derive the force, due to weak interactions, exerted by the electron-neutrinos in a background medium containing electrons, positrons and neutrons with arbitrary distribution functions. Generalization to other background species and other neutrino flavors is also discussed.

10 pages, minor changes, final version to appear in Phys.Rev. E (Feb '99)

References in corpus (1)

Cited by in corpus (15)