Anomalous Skin Effect for Anisotropic Electron Velocity Distribution Function
Authors: Igor Kaganovich, Edward Startsev, and Gennady Shvets
Date of PPPL Report: February 2004
Published in: Physics of Plasmas 11:6 (June 2004) 3328-3330.
The anomalous skin effect in a plasma with a highly anisotropic electron velocity distribution function (EVDF) is very different from skin effect in a plasma with the isotropic EVDF. An analytical solution was derived for the electric field penetrated into plasma with the EVDF described as a Maxwellian with two temperatures Tx >> Tz, where x is the direction along the plasma boundary and z is the direction perpendicular to the plasma boundary. The skin layer was found to consist of two distinctive regions of width of order νTx/ω and νTz/ω, where νTx,z = (Tx,z/m)1/2 is the thermal electron velocity and ω is the incident wave frequency.