Kinetic effects in strong Langmuir turbulence

Abstract

Kinetic effects with regard to a one dimensional Langmuir soliton-like pulse are investigated. Though thus far mainly transit-time accelerations have been investigated regarding strong Langmuir turbulence, it is found that ponderomotive reflections (generalized nonlinear Landau damping) may play important roles also. The former may diffuse fast electrons up to relativistic energies, while the latter reflects slow electrons as well as ions that have speeds comparable with the group velocity of the pulse, and tend to form flat-top electron distributions at and around the quasi-soliton.