INTERACTION BETWEEN LONGITUDINAL AND TRANSVERSE PLASMA WAVES,

The rate at which energy is fed into the transverse waves due to interaction with longitudinal waves is calculated for the case of an infinite, homogeneous isotropic, collisionless plasma. The method is based on constructing the Hamiltonian for the system in terms of creation and annihilation operators of second quantization. It turns out from the Hamiltonian that the dominate mechanism is the one in which two longitudinal waves collide to yield one transverse wave. Thus, in general the energy transfer rate decreases with time. In the limit t omega subscript p is very much 1, the results agree with the previous work. Author