Ion-acoustic heating from renormalized turbulence theory

Infinite-order perturbation theories of Vlasov turbulence are developed to obtain a renormalized formulation of the mode coupling and quasilinear equations for current-driven ion-acoustic turbulence. The renormalized theory eliminates divergence problems from nonlinear electron interactions and predicts an ion acceleration mechanism producing substantial ion tails at $t{\omega }_{\mathrm{pi}}\sim 50$ from initially cold-ion distributions. Time-dependent numerical solutions of the turbulence equations are presented, and comparisons are drawn from experiments and computer simulation.