Coulomb collision

A Coulomb collision is a binary elastic collision between two charged particles interacting through their own electric field. As with any inverse-square law, the resulting trajectories of the colliding particles is a hyperbolic Keplerian orbit. This type of collision is common in plasmas where the typical kinetic energy of the particles is too large to produce a significant deviation from the initial trajectories of the colliding particles, and the cumulative effect of many collisions is considered instead. The importance of Coulomb collisions was first pointed out by Lev Landau in 1936, who also derived the corresponding kinetic equation which is known as the Landau kinetic equation. Simplified mathematical treatment for plasmas In a plasma, a Coulomb collision rarely results in a large deflection. The cumulative effect of the many small angle collisions, however, is often larger than the effect of the few large angle collisions that occur, so it is instructive to conside

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Plasma () is one of four fundamental states of matter, characterized by the presence of a significant portion of charged particles in any combination of ions or electrons. It is the most abundant form

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Strongly driven exciton resonances in quantum wells: Light-induced dressing versus Coulomb scattering

Cristiano Ciuti, Vincenzo Savona, Paolo Schwendimann

The nonequilibrium dynamics of a two-dimensional electron-hole gas is studied in the regime of strong and resonant pumping of the exciton resonance. The Coulomb collision rates are consistently determined by taking into account the light-induced coherence of the two-band system that leads to a dressing of the carrier spectral functions. The light dressing dramatically reduces the Coulomb scattering efficiency. Results are presented for Rabi oscillations in the time domain and dynamical Stark splitting in the pump-probe absorption spectra.

2000

Coherence versus Coulomb scattering in resonantly excited quantum wells

Cristiano Ciuti, Vincenzo Savona, Paolo Schwendimann

The role of Coulomb scattering is studied in the coherent transients of strongly driven exciton resonances in semiconductor quantum wells. Coulomb scattering is treated within the second Born approximation and the light-induced dressing of the electron-hole gas is consistently included. The light dressing is found to decrease the Coulomb collision efficiency and therefore the field-driven dynamics is close to the Hartree-Fock case. Indeed, Coulomb relaxation and dephasing are not strong enough to prevent a dynamical Stark splitting in the pump-probe absorption spectra.

2000

Self-consistent ICRF simulations in fully shaped anisotropic plasmas

Stephan Brunner, Wilfred Anthony Cooper, Jonathan Graves, Martin Jucker, Nicolas Mellet

For self-consistent ICRF heating simulations, four codes have been coupled: VMEC[1] provides a fully shaped, anisotropic 3D MHD equilibrium (bi- Maxwellian distribution function), transferred to Boozer coordinates by TERPSICHORE[2]. The full-wave code LEMan[3,4] provides the IC wave field, power deposition and wave numbers (new anisotropic dielectric tensor and upshifted k). Finally, VENUS[5,6] computes the evolution of the distribution function due to ICRF heating and Coulomb collisions on the background thermal plasma (using Monte Carlo operators for Coulomb collisions and ICRH).

2009

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