Whistleron Gas in Magnetized Plasmas

Abstract

We have studied the nonlinear dynamics of whistler waves in magnetized plasmas. Since plasmas and beam-plasma systems considered here are assumed to be weakly collisional, the point of reference for the analysis performed in the present paper is the system of hydrodynamic and field equations. We have applied the renormalization group method to obtain dynamical equations for the slowly varying amplitudes of whistler waves. Further, it has been shown that the amplitudes of eigenmodes satisfy an infinite system of coupled nonlinear Schrödinger equations. In this sense, the whistler eigenmodes form a sort of a gas of interacting quasiparticles, while the slowly varying amplitudes can be considered as dynamical variables heralding the relevant information about the system. An important feature of our description is that whistler waves do not perturb the initial uniform density of plasma electrons. The plasma response to the induced whistler waves consists in velocity redistribution which follows exactly the behaviour of the whistlers. In addition, selection rules governing the nonlinear mode coupling have been derived, which represent another interesting peculiarity of our description.