Effects of Weak Collisions on Drift Wave Instabilities

摘要

The paper is concerned with the effect of weak collisions on the stability of low frequency waves in an inhomogeneous plasma. A model collision operator of the Fokker-Planck type is used to describe interactions between charged particles. The effect of these interactions appear as velocity space diffusion and friction. An exact integral of the kinetic equation is obtained. In the limit of low collision frequencies, the effects of collisions on the ion-acoustic wave, the drift wave and the drift-cyclotron wave instabilities are considered and compared with those of the other models. The present results indicate that this model differs considerably from that of Batnager, Gross and Krook, and is a more appropriate collision model for a plasma. (Author)