Landau damping of electrons with bouncing motion in a radio-frequency plasma

One-dimensional particle simulations have been conducted to study the interaction between a radio-frequency electrostatic wave and electrons with bouncing motion.It is shown that bounce resonance heating can occur at the first few harmonics of the bounce frequency(nω_(b),n=1,2,3,...).In the parameter regimes in which bounce resonance overlaps with Landau resonance,the higher harmonic bounce resonance may accelerate electrons at the velocity much lower than the wave phase velocity to Landau resonance region,enhancing Landau damping of the wave.Meanwhile,Landau resonance can increase the number of electrons in the lower harmonic bounce resonance region.Thus electrons can be efficiently heated.The result might be applicable for collisionless electron heating in low-temperature plasma discharges.

Damping of Geodesic Acoustic Mode by Trapped Electrons

We study the Landau resonance between geodesic acoustic mode（GAM） and trapped electrons as a GAM’s collisionless damping. The assumption of ˉωde 〈〈ωbeis adopted.The damping rate induced by trapped electrons is found to be an increasing function of q. In low q range, circulating-ion-induced damping rate is larger than that induced by trapped electrons.As q increases, the latter becomes larger than the former. The reason is that trapped electrons’ resonant velocity is close to vtefrom the lower side, whiles circulating ions’ resonant velocity gets bigger further from vti. So the number of resonant trapped electrons increases, whiles the number of resonant circulating ions decreases. The amplitude of damping rate induced by trapped electrons in the edge plasma can be comparable to that induced by circulating ions in the low q range.Another phenomenon we found is that in the chosen range of, the damping caused by trapped electrons has a maximum value at point εq for different q. The reason is that as is close to q,trapped electorns’ resonant velocity is close to vte.