Effects of high-frequency fields on plasma transport coefficients

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Abstract
It is shown that laser fields in plasmas, in addition to the usual ponderomotive force in the center-of-mass momentum equation, give rise to significant modifications of the material stresses and additional terms in the Ohm’s law and equation for the heat flow vector. These are evaluated explicitly for the case of a single geometric optics field assuming that the slowly varying part of the electron distribution function is collision dominated, that the equation for the high frequency part can be linearized, and that the effective charge number Z≫1. The new terms are all roughly proportional to the energy density in the high-frequency field. They are thus comparable in magnitude with conventional ponderomotive forces.