Cosmic-ray particle transport in weakly turbulent plasmas. Part 1. Theory

Abstract

We consider a quasi-linear theory for the acceleration rates and propagation parameters of charged test particles in weakly turbulent electromagnetic plasmas. The similarity between two recent approaches to modelling of therandom electromagnetic field is demonstrated. It is shown that both the concept of dynamical magnetic turbulence and the concept of superposition of individual plasma modes lead to particle Fokker—Planck coefficients in which the sharp delta functions describing the resonant interaction of the particles have to be replaced by Breit—Wigner-type resonance functions, which are controlled by the dynamical turbulence decay time and the wave-damping time respectively. The resulting resonance broadening will significantly change the evaluation of cosmic-ray transport parameters.