Jr. Myra et Da. Dippolito, NONLINEAR DENSITY EXPULSION AND ELECTRON HEATING IN THE NONADIABATIC REGIME, AND APPLICATION TO ION BERNSTEIN WAVE HEATING, Physics of plasmas, 4(9), 1997, pp. 3187-3193
In the limit where a strong parallel electric field has short parallel
scale lengths, the parallel electron motion becomes nonadiabatic and
highly nonlinear, and the usual ponderomotive treatment of the slow ti
me scale behavior of electrons is invalid. Were, a new nonadiabatic mo
del for describing the resulting heating and expulsion of electrons fr
om regions of a strong electric field is developed. The model shows th
at a typical electron is heated to a value characterized by the ''quiv
er'' velocity in the applied field. A nonlinear density expulsion stil
l occurs in this nonadiabatic strong rf field limit, but exhibits an a
lgebraic dependence on the wave amplitude in contrast to the exponenti
al dependence that occurs in conventional ponderomotive theory. Result
s are applied to electrons in the edge plasma, near a high-power Ion B
ernstein Wave heating antenna. (C) 1997 American Institute of Physics.