Progress in the kinetic description of non-stationary behaviour of the electron ensemble in non-isothermal plasmas

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Abstract
The understanding of the temporal behaviour of a plasma at several time varying conditions is of great interest under general physical aspects as well as from the point of view of very different applications. After an short survey concerning the investigations related to such problems in the following we discuss some more comprehensive results which were recently obtained in the investigations of the electron ensemble both at the field free collision dominated relaxation in the afterglow during the first period of temporal decay and at the collision dominated relaxation in a plasma with additional heating by an electric field. These studies take into account all main collision processes using realistic functions for the energy dependence of the correlated collision cross sections. The results were attained by the numerical determination of the isotropic velocity distribution function of the electrons and resulting macroscopic quantities. In this way on the basis of kinetic theory a deeper insigth into the temporal relaxation mechanism of the electron ensemble in weakly ionized collision dominated plasmas can be gained for many different models of the temporal behaviour of the electric field as the jump-like change and the continuous aperiodical as well as periodical alteration of the field. Thus with the developed sure and widely applicable numerical methods a firm basis has been established to perform further investigations of more general problems grouped around the relaxation models presented here

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