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Also, the plasma is similar to coupled oscillators via the collective behav-
iour. Basic characteristic oscillation frequency of plasma is the plasma
1
2
frequency (= (4 ) 2 ),where is the electron mass. A condition
for ionized gas to be a plasma is that, is much smaller than the sys-
tem dimension i.e. . Debye shielding is valid only for enough
particles in Debye sphere. The number of particles in “Debye sphere”
is
3
=(43) (1.1)
then we demand that
1 (1.2)
For collisions, a third condition is 1; is the mean interval time
between any collision with the neutral atoms. Thus the conditions for
plasma must satisfy:
¿ (1.3)
À 1 (1.4)
and
1 (1.5)
1.3 Fluid Description of Plasma
In fluid theory, plasma is described by macroscopic time and space
functions. By neglecting viscosity and collisions, normalized electron fluid
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