Ion response in a weakly ionized plasma with ion flow

Abstract

We study the ion response to an initial perturbation in a weakly ionized plasma with ion flow driven by a dc electric field. The analysis is made by extending the classical Landau work [J. Phys. (USSR) 10, 25 (1946)] to the ion kinetic equation including ion-neutral collisions and a dc electric field. We show, in particular, that the complex frequencies of ion waves can be directly found from a known expression for the ion susceptibility [Phys. Rev. E 71, 016405 (2005); Phys. Rep. 27, 997 (2001)]; this is not obvious from its original derivation, because it only aims to describe the ion response for real frequencies.