PPPL-3495 is available in pdf or postscript formats.

Shear-Alfvén Waves in Gyrokinetic Plasmas

Authors: W.W. Lee, J.L.V. Lewandowski, T.S. Hahm, and Z. Lin

Date of PPPL Report: October 2000

Published in: Physics of Plasmas 8 (Ocrober 2001) 4435-4440.

It is found that the thermal fluctuation level of the shear-Alfvén waves in a gyrokinetic plasma decreases with plasma b (is identical to cs2/uA2), where cs is the ion acoustic speed and uA is the Alfvén velocity. This unique thermodynamic property based on the fluctuation-dissipation theorem is verified in this paper using a new gyrokinetic particle simulation scheme, which splits the particle distribution function into the equilibrium part as well as the adiabatic and nonadiabatic parts.