Chapter 4

Plasma Dynamics

4.1 Plasma in electric and magnetic field

In this section we will consider charged particle behavior in electric and magnetic fields using a single particle approach. One peculiarity of this approach is that both electric and magnetic fields will be considered given and independent of the plasma properties.

Let us consider firstly the influence of a magnetic field only on a charge q (which could be positive or negative) of a particle with mass m. In this case, equation of motion for a charge particle reads

image (4.1)

If the magnetic field has only component in z-direction (as shown in Figure 4.1), the equations for each component ...

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