Landau Damping of Electrostatic Waves in Arbitrarily Degenerate Quantum Plasmas

Abstract

We carry out a systematic study of the dispersion relation for linear electrostatic waves in an arbitrarily degenerate quantum electron plasma. We solve for the complex frequency spectrum for arbitrary values of wavenumber $k$ and level of degeneracy $\mu$. Our finding is that for large $k$ and high $\mu$ the real part of the frequency $\omega_{r}$ grows linearly with $k$ and scales with $\mu$ only because of the scaling of the Fermi energy. In this regime the relative Landau damping rate $\gamma/\omega_{r}$ becomes independent of $k$ and varies inversly with $\mu$. Thus, damping is weak but finite at moderate levels of degeneracy for short wavelengths.