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Electrostatic shielding in plasmas and the physical meaning of the Debye length

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2014

G. Livadiotis  and
D. J. McComas
G. Livadiotis*
Affiliation:
Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, TX, USA
D. J. McComas
Affiliation:
Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, TX, USA Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA
*
†Email address for correspondence: glivadiotis@swri.edu
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Abstract

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This paper examines the electrostatic shielding in plasmas, and resolves inconsistencies about what the Debye length really is. Two different interpretations of the Debye length are currently used: (1) The potential energy approximately equals the thermal energy, and (2) the ratio of the shielded to the unshielded potential drops to 1/e. We examine these two interpretations of the Debye length for equilibrium plasmas described by the Boltzmann distribution, and non-equilibrium plasmas (e.g. space plasmas) described by kappa distributions. We study three dimensionalities of the electrostatic potential: 1-D potential of linear symmetry for planar charge density, 2-D potential of cylindrical symmetry for linear charge density, and 3-D potential of spherical symmetry for a point charge. We resolve critical inconsistencies of the two interpretations, including: independence of the Debye length on the dimensionality; requirement for small charge perturbations that is equivalent to weakly coupled plasmas; correlations between ions and electrons; existence of temperature for non-equilibrium plasmas; and isotropic Debye shielding. We introduce a third Debye length interpretation that naturally emerges from the second statistical moment of the particle position distribution; this is analogous to the kinetic definition of temperature, which is the second statistical moment of the velocity distribution. Finally, we compare the three interpretations, identifying what information is required for theoretical/experimental plasma-physics research: Interpretation 1 applies only to kappa distributions; Interpretation 2 is not restricted to any specific form of the ion/electron distributions, but these forms have to be known; Interpretation 3 needs only the second statistical moment of the positional distribution.

Type
Papers
Information
Journal of Plasma Physics , Volume 80 , Issue 3 , June 2014 , pp. 341 - 378
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - SA
The online version of this article is published within an Open Access environment subject to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014

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