Natural fluctuations in un-magnetized and magnetized plasmas

Abstract

There are still open issues within the fluctuation theory of plasmas, in view of the difficulty of formulating adequate theoretical approaches and solving the related equations in particular regimes. A promising alternative approach is direct microphysical modeling based on first principles, as successfully applied to neutral rarefied fluids. Within this approach, the equations of motion of a large ensemble of charged particles are solved numerically while correlations are obtained from statistical analysis of the ensemble at different times. As a first step, in this work we validate the data analysis technique adopted in this numerical scheme for the case of an electron ensemble neglecting Coulomb interactions. The simulation results are compared with the analytical theory of ‘natural’ fluctuations for both un-magnetized and magnetized plasmas. For the latter, the derivations for arbitrary average distribution functions are presented.