A New Look at the Landau's Theory of Spreading and Damping of Waves in Collisionless Plasmas

Abstract

The theory of plasma waves and Landau damping in Maxwellian plasmas, Landau's ``rule of pass around poles'' include doubtful statements, particularly related to an artificial ``constructing'' of the dispersion equation, what should allow the possibility of its solution otherwise not existing at all, and the possibility of analytical continuations of corresponding very specific ruptured functions in the one-dimensional Laplace transformation, used by Landau, what is the base of his theory. We represent, as an accessible variant, a more general alternative theory based on a two-dimensional Laplace transformation, leading to an asymptotical in time and space solution as a complicated superposition of coupled damping and {\em non-damping \/} plane waves and oscillations with different dispersion laws for every constituent mode. This theory naturally and very simply explains paradoxes of the phenomenon of plasma echo. We propose for discussion a new ideology of plasma waves (both electron and ion-acoustic waves) qualitatively different from the traditional theory of Landau damping for non-collisional as well as for low-collisional plasmas.