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Biological and Chemical Physics

Series

2011

Science

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Physics

Relativistic Transformation Of Phase-Space Distributions, R A. Treumann, R Nakamura, W Baumjohann Jul 2011

Relativistic Transformation Of Phase-Space Distributions, R A. Treumann, R Nakamura, W Baumjohann

Dartmouth Scholarship

We investigate the transformation of the distri- bution function in the relativistic case, a problem of interest in plasma when particles with high (relativistic) velocities come into play as for instance in radiation belt physics, in the electron-cyclotron maser radiation theory, in the vicin- ity of high-Mach number shocks where particles are acceler- ated to high speeds, and generally in solar and astrophysical plasmas. We show that the phase-space volume element is a Lorentz constant and construct the general particle distri- bution function from first principles. Application to thermal equilibrium lets us derive a modified version of the isotropic relativisticthermaldistribution,themodifiedJu …


Collisional Transfer Of Population And Orientation In Nak, Seth T. Ashman, C. M. Wolfe, J. Bai, B. Beser, E. H. Ahmed, A. M. Lyyra, J. Huennekens Jan 2011

Collisional Transfer Of Population And Orientation In Nak, Seth T. Ashman, C. M. Wolfe, J. Bai, B. Beser, E. H. Ahmed, A. M. Lyyra, J. Huennekens

Engineering & Physics Faculty Publications

Collisional satellite lines with |ΔJ| ≤ 58 have been identified in recent polarization spectroscopy V-type optical–optical double resonance (OODR) excitation spectra of the Rb2 molecule [H. Salami et al., Phys. Rev.A80, 022515 (2009)]. Observation of these satellite lines clearly requires a transfer of population from the rotational level directly excited by the pump laser to a neighboring level in a collision of the molecule with an atomic perturber. However to be observed in polarization spectroscopy, the collision must also partially preserve the angular momentum orientation, which is at least somewhat surprising given the extremely large values of …