Coulomb collisions in strongly anisotropic plasmas I. Cyclotron cooling in electron–ion plasmas

Abstract

The behaviour of a collisional plasma that is optically thin to cyclotron radiation is considered, and the distribution functions accessible to it on the various time scales in the system are calculated. Particular attention is paid to the limit in which the collision time exceeds the radiation emission time, making the electron distribution function strongly anisotropic. Unusually for plasma physics, the collision operator can nevertheless be calculated analytically although the plasma is far from Maxwellian. The rate of radiation emission is calculated and found to be governed by the collision frequency multiplied by a factor that only depends logarithmically on plasma parameters.