Covariant Constitutive Relations, Landau Damping and Non-stationary Inhomogeneous Plasmas

TL;DR

This paper develops covariant electromagnetic models for inhomogeneous plasmas, enabling analysis of Landau damping in non-stationary states, with broad applicability to dispersive media.

Contribution

It introduces a covariant framework for constitutive relations in plasmas, including a perturbative approach to describe Landau damping in dynamic, inhomogeneous conditions.

Findings

Formulated covariant constitutive relations for dispersive media

Derived a linear relation for non-stationary inhomogeneous plasmas

Enabled analysis of generalized Landau damping mechanisms

Abstract

Models of covariant linear electromagnetic constitutive relations are formulated that have wide applicability to the computation of susceptibility tensors for dispersive and inhomogeneous media. A perturbative framework is used to derive a linear constitutive relation for a globally neutral plasma enabling one to describe in this context a generalized Landau damping mechanism for non-stationary inhomogeneous plasma states.