STUDY OF TRANSIENT PHENOMENA IN LOW PRESSURE GAS DISCHARGE PLASMAS.

Work during this period was aimed at a better understanding of the effect of electron-neutral collision processes on electrostatic waves. In weakly ionized plasmas binary electron-electron and electron-ion collisions are rare so that one can use the Lorentz-gas approximation for the electron gas. This model is simple enough to yield a dispersion relation for electrostatic waves, which takes the detailed balancing of the elastic collision process rigorously into account. Numerical results were obtained for the simplest case of monoenergetic electrons colliding with hard elastic spheres. Author