- 1Department of Physics, Saint Michael’s College, Colchester, VT, United States
- 2Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, Houston, TX, United States
Hamiltonian formulations of quasilinear theory are presented for the cases of uniform and nonuniform magnetized plasmas. First, the standard quasilinear theory of Kennel and Engelmann (Kennel, Phys. Fluids, 1966, 9, 2377) is reviewed and reinterpreted in terms of a general Hamiltonian formulation. Within this Hamiltonian representation, we present the transition from two-dimensional quasilinear diffusion in a spatially uniform magnetized background plasma to three-dimensional quasilinear diffusion in a spatially nonuniform magnetized background plasma based on our previous work (Brizard and Chan, Phys. Plasmas, 2001, 8, 4762–4771; Brizard and Chan, Phys. Plasmas, 2004, 11, 4220–4229). The resulting quasilinear theory for nonuniform magnetized plasmas yields a 3 × 3 diffusion tensor that naturally incorporates quasilinear radial diffusion as well as its synergistic connections to diffusion in two-dimensional invariant velocity space (e.g., energy and pitch angle).
1 Introduction
The complex interaction between charged particles and electromagnetic-field wave fluctuations in a magnetized plasma represents a formidable problem with crucial implications toward our understanding of magnetic confinement in laboratory and space plasmas (Kaufman and Cohen, 2019). These wave-particle interactions can be described either linearly, quasi-linearly, or nonlinearly, depending on how the background plasma is affected by the fluctuating wave fields and the level of plasma turbulence associated with them (Davidson, 1972).
In linear plasma wave theory (Stix, 1992), where the field fluctuations are arbitrarily small, the linearized perturbed Vlasov distribution of each charged-particle species describes the charged-particle response to the presence of small-amplitude electromagnetic waves which, when coupled to the linearized Maxwell wave equations, yields a wave spectrum that is supported by the uniform background magnetized plasma (Stix, 1992).
In weak plasma turbulence theory (Sagdeev and Galeev, 1969; Galeev and Sagdeev, 1983), the background plasma is considered weakly unstable so that a (possibly discrete) spectrum of field perturbations grow to finite but small amplitudes. While these small-amplitude fluctuations interact weakly among themselves, they interact strongly with resonant particles, which satisfy a wave-particle resonance condition in particle phase space (described in terms of unperturbed particle orbits). These resonant wave-particle interactions, in turn, lead to a quasilinear modification of the background Vlasov distribution on a long time scale compared to the fluctuation time scale (Kaufman, 1972a; Dewar, 1973).
Lastly, in strong plasma turbulence theory (Dupree, 1966), nonlinear wave-wave and wave-particle-wave interactions cannot be neglected, and wave-particle resonances include perturbed particle orbits (Galeev and Sagdeev, 1983). The reader is referred to a pedagogical review by Krommes (Krommes, 2002) on the theoretical foundations of plasma turbulence as well as a recent study on the validity of quasilinear theory (Crews and Shumlak, 2022). In addition, the mathematical foundations of quasilinear theory for inhomogeneous plasma can be found in the recent work by Dodin (Dodin, 2022).
1.1 Motivation for this work
The primary purpose of the present paper is to present complementary views of two-dimensional quasilinear diffusion in a uniform magnetized plasma. First, we review the quasilinear theory derived by Kennel and Engelmann (Kennel and Engelmann, 1966), which represents the paradigm formulation upon which many subsequent quasilinear formulations are derived (Stix, 1992). (We mainly focus our attention on non-relativistic quasilinear theory in the text and summarize the extension to relativistic quasilinear theory in Supplementary Appendix A) As an alternative formulation of quasilinear theory, we present a Hamiltonian formulation that relies on the use of guiding-center theory for a uniform magnetic field (Cary and Brizard, 2009). In this Hamiltonian formulation, the quasilinear diffusion equation is described in terms of a diffusion tensor whose structure is naturally generalized to three-dimensional quasilinear diffusion in a nonuniform magnetized plasma, as shown in the works of Brizard and Chan (Brizard and Chan, 2001; Brizard and Chan, 2004).
Next, two formulations of three-dimensional quasilinear theory are be presented. First, we present a generic quasilinear formulation based on the action-angle formalism (Kaufman, 1972b; Mahajan and Chen, 1985), which applies to general magnetic-field geometries. This formulation is useful in highlighting the modular features of the quasilinear diffusion tensor. Our second three-dimensional quasilinear formulation is developed for the case of an axisymmetric magnetic field B0 = ∇ψ × ∇φ, for which the drift action
1.2 Notation for quasilinear theory in a uniform magnetized plasma
In a homogeneous magnetic field
Following the notation used by Kennel and Engelmann (Kennel and Engelmann, 1966), the velocity v and wave vector k are decomposed in terms of cylindrical components
so that k ⋅ v = k‖v‖ + k⊥v⊥ cos(ϕ − ψ), where ϕ is the gyroangle phase and ψ is the wave-vector phase. We note that the unperturbed Vlasov equation ∂f0/∂ϕ = 0 implies that f0(v) is independent of the gyroangle ϕ, i.e., f0(v‖, v⊥). In what follows, we will use the definition
and the identity
We note that, in the work of Kennel and Engelmann (Kennel and Engelmann, 1966), the right-handed polarized electric field is
2 Kennel-Engelmann quasilinear diffusion equation
In this Section, we review the quasilinear theory presented by Kennel and Engelmann (Kennel and Engelmann, 1966) for the case of a uniform magnetized plasma. Here, we make several changes in notation from Kennel and Engelmann’s work in preparation for an alternative formulation presented in Section 3.
2.1 First-order perturbed Vlasov equation
The linearized perturbed Vlasov equation is expressed in terms of the first-order differential equation for the eikonal amplitude
where Ω = qB0/(Mc) denotes the (signed) gyrofrequency and the solution of the integrating factor ∂Θ/∂ϕ ≡Ω−1dϑ/dt = (k ⋅ v − ω)/Ω yields
where λ = k⊥v⊥/Ω. The perturbed Vlasov Eq. 2.1 is easily solved as
where a prime denotes a dependence on the integration gyroangle ϕ′. Here, we can write the perturbed evolution operator
which is expressed in terms of the velocity-space eikonal amplitudes.
where
We now remark that, since ∂f0(v‖, v⊥)/∂ϕ vanishes, only the first two terms in Eq. 2.4 are non-vanishing when applied to f0. Hence, Eq. 2.3 contains the integrals.
In order to evaluate these integrals, we use the Bessel-Fourier decomposition
where the resonant denominator is
while, using the identity Eq. 1.3, the vector integral Eq. 2.9 becomes
where we introduced the vector-valued Bessel function
with the identity
which follows from a standard recurrence relation for Bessel functions. The perturbed Vlasov distribution (Eq. 2.3) is thus expressed as
where the Bessel-Fourier components are
Once again, Eqs. 2.15.17.–.Eqs. 2.2.17 agree exactly with Eq. 2.19 of Kennel and Engelmann (Kennel and Engelmann, 1966) when Faraday’s law is inserted in Eqs. 2.16, 2.17; see Supplementary Appendix A for details. The relativistic version of Eqs. 2.15.17.–.Eqs. 2.2.17, which was first derived by Lerche (Lerche, 1968), is also shown in Supplementary Appendix A.
2.2 Quasilinear diffusion in velocity space
We are now ready to calculate the expression for the quasilinear diffusion equation for the slow evolution (τ = ϵ2t) of the background Vlasov distribution
where ϵ denotes the amplitude of the perturbation fields, ⟨ ⟩ denotes a gyroangle average, and
First, since Eqs. 2.5, 2.6 are independent of v‖ and v⊥, respectively, we find
where we took into account the proper Jacobian (v⊥) in cylindrical velocity space (v‖, v⊥, ϕ). On the other hand, the third term in Eq. 2.18 can be written as
where the last term in Eq. 2.7 is independent of the gyroangle ϕ. Since this term cancels the last term in Eq. 2.19, the quasilinear diffusion Eq. 2.18 becomes
Next, using the identity Eq. 1.3, we find
so that, from Eq. 2.15, we find
Hence, the quasilinear diffusion Eq. 2.20 can be written as
where the diagonal diffusion coefficients are
while the off-diagonal diffusion coefficients are
which are defined to be explicitly symmetric (i.e.,
where we assumed ω = ωr + i γ and took the weakly unstable limit γ → 0+. Hence, the quasilinear diffusion coefficients (2.24)–(2.27) are driven by resonant particles, which satisfy the resonance condition k‖v‖res ≡ ω − ℓΩ. The reader is referred to the early references by Kaufman (Kaufman, 1972a) and Dewar (Dewar, 1973) concerning the role of non-resonant particles in demonstrating the energy-momentum conservation laws of quasilinear theory.
Eq. 2.25 from Kennel and Engelmann (Kennel and Engelmann, 1966) (see Supplementary Appendix A) can be expressed as the dyadic diffusion tensor
which is Hermitian since the term − i Δℓ is replaced with Re( − i Δℓ). Here, the perturbed velocity
explicitly separates the electric and magnetic contributions to the quasilinear diffusion tensor Eq. 2.29. In particular, the role of the perturbed perpendicular magnetic field is clearly seen in the process of pitch-angle diffusion because of the presence of the terms
Lastly, we note that the dyadic form Eq. 2.29 of the quasilinear diffusion tensor in the quasilinear diffusion Eq. 2.23 can be used to easily verify that the unperturbed entropy
Once again, the energy-momentum conservation laws in quasilinear theory will not be discussed here. Instead the interested reader can consult earlier references (Kaufman, 1972a; Dewar, 1973), as well as Chapters 16–18 in the standard textbook by Stix (Stix, 1992).
2.3 Quasilinear diffusion in invariant velocity space
In preparation for Section 3, we note that a natural choice of velocity-space coordinates, suggested by guiding-center theory, involves replacing the parallel velocity v‖ with the parallel momentum p‖ = M v‖ and the perpendicular speed v⊥ with the magnetic moment
With this change of coordinates, the quasilinear diffusion Eq. 2.23 becomes
where the quasilinear diffusion coefficients are
with the eikonal amplitudes
and the symmetry Dμp = Dpμ follows from the assumption of a Hermitian diffusion tensor. Lastly, as expected, we note that the eikonal amplitude for the perturbed kinetic energy
only involves the perturbed electric field. Hence, another useful representation of quasilinear diffusion in invariant velocity
where the quasilinear diffusion coefficients are
and the Jacobian 1/v‖ is a function of
3 Hamiltonian quasilinear diffusion equation
In Section 2, we reviewed the standard formulation of quasilinear theory in a uniform magnetized plasma (Kennel and Engelmann, 1966). In this Section, we introduce the Hamiltonian formulation of the Vlasov equation from which we will derive the Hamiltonian quasilinear diffusion equation, which will then be compared with the Kennel-Engelmann quasilinear diffusion Eq. 2.23.
In order to proceed with a Hamiltonian formulation, however, we will be required to express the perturbed electric and magnetic fields in terms of perturbed electric and magnetic potentials. We note that, despite the use of these potentials, the gauge invariance of the Hamiltonian quasilinear diffusion equation will be guaranteed in the formulation adopted here.
3.1 Non-adiabatic decomposition of the perturbed Vlasov distribution
The Hamiltonian formulation of quasilinear diffusion begins with the representation of the perturbed electric and magnetic fields in terms of the perturbed electric scalar potential δΦ and the perturbed magnetic vector potential δA, where δE = −∇δΦ − c−1∂δA/∂t and δB = ∇ × δA. Hence, we find the identity
where d/dt denotes the unperturbed time derivative. We note that the gauge transformation
guarantees the gauge invariance of the right side of Eq. 3.1.
Next, by removing the perturbed magnetic vector potential δA from the canonical momentum
the noncanonical Poisson bracket (which can also be expressed in divergence form)
only contains the unperturbed magnetic field B0., where f and g are arbitrary functions of (x, v).
The removal of the perturbed magnetic vector potential δA from the noncanonical Poisson bracket Eq. 3.3, however, implies that the perturbed Vlasov distribution can be written as
where the non-adiabatic contribution δg is said to be generated by the perturbation scalar field δs (Brizard, 1994; Brizard, 2018; Brizard and Chandre, 2020), which satisfies the first-order eikonal equation
Hence, the eikonal solution for
where the gyroangle Fourier component of the effective perturbed potential is
and the eikonal amplitude of the non-adiabatic perturbed Vlasov distribution is
where μ ≡ M|v⊥|2/(2B0) denotes the magnetic moment. We note that, under the gauge transformations Eq. 3.2, the scalar field δs transforms as δs → δs − (q/c) δχ (Brizard, 1994; Brizard, 2018; Brizard and Chandre, 2020), and the expression Eq. 3.5 for the perturbed Vlasov distribution is gauge-invariant. Moreover, under the gauge transformation Eq. 3.2, the eikonal Fourier amplitude Eq. 3.8 transforms as
which is consistent with Eq. 3.2.
Next, since the components of the Poisson bracket Eq. 3.3 are constant, the unperturbed time derivative of δf yields the linearized perturbed Vlasov equation
which implies that the non-adiabatic decomposition Eq. 3.5 is a valid representation of the perturbed Vlasov distribution.
3.2 Second-order perturbed Vlasov equation
In order to derive an alternate formulation of quasilinear theory for uniform magnetized plasmas, we begin with second-order evolution of the background Vlasov distribution
where, once again, τ = ϵ2t denotes the slow quasilinear diffusion time scale, we have ignored the second-order perturbed Vlasov distribution f2, and we have inserted Eqs. 3.1, 3.3. The first term on the right side of Eq. 3.12 can be written as
where we have inserted the non-adiabatic decomposition Eq. 3.5, so that the first term can be written as
where we used {δΨ, δA} = (δA/Mc) ⋅ ∇δA. The second term on the right side of Eq. 3.12, on the other hand, can be written as
Next, by using the Jacobi identity for the Poisson bracket (3.3):
which holds for arbitrary functions (f, g, h), we obtain
where δH2 = q2|δA|2/(2Mc2) is the second-order perturbed Hamiltonian. We now look at the first term on the right side of Eq. 3.15, which we write as
Because of the symmetry of the tensor
where we used the Jacobi identity Eq. 3.16 to find {x, {v, f0}} = {v, {x, f0}}, since {f0, {x, v}} = 0.
When these equations are combined into Eq. 3.12, we obtain the final Hamiltonian form of the second-order perturbed Vlasov equation
where δH = q δΨ = q δΦ − q δA ⋅ v/c and δg = {δs, f0}.
3.3 Hamiltonian quasilinear diffusion equation
We now perform two separate averages of the second-order perturbed Vlasov Eq. 3.19: we first perform an average with respect to the wave phase ϑ, which will be denoted by an overbar, and, second, we perform an average with respect to the gyroangle ϕ. We begin by noting that the averaged second-order perturbed Hamiltonian
The Hamiltonian quasilinear diffusion equation is, therefore, defined as
where we used the divergence form Eq. 3.4 of the Poisson bracket and the eikonal average of the spatial divergence vanishes. Next, the eikonal average of the first term on the last line of the right side of Eq. 3.20 yields
so that
where p‖ = M v‖ and μ = M|v⊥|2/2B0. The eikonal average of the second term on the last line of the right side of Eq. 3.20, on the other hand, yields
so that by combining Eqs. 3.21, 3.22 into Eq. 3.20, we find
In order to evaluate the gyroangle averages in Eq. 3.23, we need to proceed with a transformation from particle phase space to guiding-center phase space, which is presented in the next Section.
4 Guiding-center Hamiltonian quasilinear diffusion equation
In this Section, we use the guiding-center transformation (Northrop, 1963) in order to simplify the calculations involved in obtaining an explicit expression for the Hamiltonian quasilinear diffusion Eq. 3.23 that can compared with the standard quasilinear diffusion Eq. 2.32 obtained from Kennel-Engelmann’s work (Kennel and Engelmann, 1966).
4.1 Guiding-center transformation
In a uniform background magnetic field, the transformation from particle phase space to guiding-center phase space is simply given as x = X + ρ, where the particle position x is expressed as the sum of the guiding-center position X and the gyroradius vector
where θ denotes the guiding-center eikonal wave phase and Λ ≡ λ sin(ϕ − ψ). Next, the particle Poisson bracket (Eq. 3.3) is transformed into the guiding-center Poisson bracket (Cary and Brizard, 2009)
where the last term vanishes in the case of a uniform background plasma since the guiding-center functions F and G depend on the guiding-center position only through the guiding-center wave phase θ (with ∇θ = k).
4.2 First-order perturbed guiding-center Vlasov equation
The guiding-center transformation induces a transformation on particle phase-space functions f to a guiding-center phase-space function F through the guiding-center push-forward
The eikonal amplitude of the guiding-center generating function
The solution of the first-order guiding-center eikonal Eq. 4.4 makes use of the gyroangle expansion
Inserting this solution into Eq. 4.3, with the gyroangle expansion
Hence, the solution for the eikonal amplitude
4.3 Guiding-center Hamiltonian quasilinear diffusion equation
Using the solution Eq. 4.6 for
4.3.1 Quasilinear diffusion in guiding-center (p‖, μ)-space
Now that the solution for the eikonal amplitude δg is obtained in terms of the guiding-center phase-space function
so that
where we introduced the quasilinear perturbation potential
and
where
Next, we find
so that
where
This quasilinear diffusion equation will later be compared with the standard quasilinear diffusion Eq. 2.32 derived by Kennel and Engelmann (Kennel and Engelmann, 1966).
4.3.2 Quasilinear diffusion in guiding-center -space
Before proceeding with this comparison, however, we consider an alternate representation for the Hamiltonian quasilinear diffusion Eq. 4.13, which will be useful in the derivation of a quasilinear diffusion equation for nonuniform magnetized plasmas. If we replace the guiding-center parallel momentum p‖ with the guiding-center kinetic energy
where the first term on the right side is interpreted as a guiding-center adiabatic contribution to the perturbed Vlasov distribution (Brizard, 1994), while the remaining terms (proportional to the resonant denominator Δℓ) are non-adiabatic contributions.
By substituting this new solution in Eq. 4.8, we find
while
where the guiding-center adiabatic contribution has cancelled out. The guiding-center quasilinear diffusion Eq. 4.13 becomes
where the guiding-center quasilinear diffusion tensor is represented in 2 × 2 matrix form as
We note that, because of the simple dyadic form of Eq. 4.18, other representations for the guiding-center quasilinear diffusion tensor
4.4 Comparison with Kennel-Engelmann quasilinear theory
We can now compare the Kennel-Engelmann quasilinear diffusion Eq. 2.32 with the guiding-center Hamiltonian quasilinear diffusion Eq. 4.13. First, we express the perturbed fields Eqs. 2.34, 2.35 in terms of the perturbed potentials (δΦ, δA):
and
which are both gauge invariant according to the transformation (Eq. 3.10). Hence, these perturbed fields are expressed in terms of a contribution from the perturbed action
which yields
In summary, we have shown that, in the resonant-particle limit (Δℓ → ∞), the Hamiltonian quasilinear diffusion Eq. 4.13 is identical to the standard quasilinear diffusion Eq. 2.32 derived by Kennel and Engelmann (Kennel and Engelmann, 1966) for the case of a uniform magnetized plasma. In the next Section, we will see how the Hamiltonian quasilinear formalism can be extended to the case of a nonuniform magnetized plasma.
5 Hamiltonian quasilinear formulations for nonuniform magnetized plasma
In this Section, we briefly review the Hamiltonian formulation for quasilinear diffusion in a nonuniform magnetized background plasma. In an axisymmetric magnetic-field geometry, the 2 × 2 quasilinear diffusion tensor in velocity space is generalized to a 3 × 3 quasilinear diffusion tensor that includes radial quasilinear diffusion. In a spatially magnetically-confined plasma, the process of radial diffusion is a crucial element in determining whether charged particles leave the plasma. A prime example is provided by the case of radial diffusion in Earth’s radiation belt, which was recently reviewed by Lejosne and Kollmann (Lejosne and Kollmann, 2020).
We present two non-relativistic Hamiltonian formulations of quasilinear diffusion in a nonuniform magnetized plasmas. The first one based on the canonical action-angle formalism (Kaufman, 1972b; Mahajan and Chen, 1985; Mynick and Duvall, 1989; Schulz, 1996) and the second one based on a summary of our previous work (Brizard and Chan, 2004).
5.1 Canonical action-angle formalism
When a plasma is confined by a nonuniform magnetic field, the charged-particle orbits can be described in terms of 3 orbital angle coordinates θ (generically referred to as the gyration, bounce, and precession-drift angles) and their canonically-conjugate 3 action coordinates J (generically referred to as the gyromotion, bounce-motion, and drift-motion actions). In principle, these action coordinates are adiabatic invariants of the particle motion and they are calculated according to standard methods of guiding-center theory (Tao et al., 2007; Cary and Brizard, 2009), which are expressed in terms of asymptotic expansions in powers of a small dimensionless parameter ϵB = ρ/LB ≪ 1 defined as the ratio of a characteristic gyroradius (for a given particle species) and the gradient length scale LB associated with the background magnetic field B0. When an asymptotic expansion for an adiabatic invariant
The canonical action-angle formulation of quasilinear theory assumes that, in the absence of wave-field perturbations, the action coordinates J are constants of motion dJ/dt = − ∂H0/∂θ = 0, which follows from the invariance of the unperturbed Hamiltonian H0(J) on the canonical orbital angles θ. In this case, the unperturbed Vlasov distribution F0(J) is a function of action coordinates only. We note that the action coordinates considered here are either exact invariants or adiabatic invariants (Kaufman, 1972b; Mynick and Duvall, 1989) of the particle motion, and it is implicitly assumed that any adiabatic action invariant used in this canonical action-angle formulation of quasilinear theory can be calculated to sufficiently high order in ϵB within a region of particle phase space that excludes non-adiabatic diffusion in action space (Bernstein and Rowlands, 1976). For example, see Ref. (Brizard and Markowski, 2022) for a brief discussion of the breakdown of the adiabatic invariance of the magnetic moment (on the bounce time scale) for charged particles trapped by an axisymmetric dipole magnetic field.
In the presence of wave-field perturbations, the perturbed Hamiltonian can be represented in terms of a Fourier decomposition in terms of a discrete wave spectrum ωk and orbital angles (with Fourier-index vector m):
where the parametric dependence of
from which we obtain the solution for the Fourier component
where Ω(J) ≡ ∂H0/∂J denotes the unperturbed orbital-frequency vector.
The quasilinear wave-particle interactions cause the Vlasov distribution F0(J, τ) to evolve on a slow time scale τ = ϵ2t, represented by the quasilinear diffusion equation
where ⟨ ⟩ includes orbital-angle averaging and wave time-scale averaging, and the canonical quasilinear diffusion tensor
is expressed in terms of a dyadic Fourier tensor mm, a wave-particle resonance condition obtained from the Plemelj formula
and the magnitude squared of the perturbed Hamiltonian Fourier component
satisfies the H Theorem. Lastly, we note that collisional transport in a magnetized plasma can also be described in terms of drag and diffusion in action space (Bernstein and Molvig, 1983).
5.2 Local and bounce-averaged wave-particle resonances in quasilinear theory
The canonical action-angle formalism presented in Section 5.1 unfortunately makes use of the bounce action
where the bounce period τb ≡∮ ds/v‖ is the Jacobian. In addition, the 3 × 3 quasilinear diffusion tensor
is defined in terms of the Fourier indices ℓ (associated with the gyroangle ζ) and m (associated with the toroidal angle φ) and the wave frequency ωk, while the scalar Γℓkm was shown in Ref. (Brizard and Chan, 2004) to include the bounce-averaged wave-particle resonance condition
where
where σ ≡ v‖/|v‖| denotes the sign of the parallel guiding-center velocity, and the points
We begin with the linear guiding-center Vlasov equation in guiding-center phase space
where the perturbed Hamiltonian is a function of the guiding-center invariants
and d0/dt = ∂/∂t + v‖ ∂/∂s + ωd ∂/∂φ + ωc ∂/∂ζ denotes the unperturbed Vlasov operator (s denotes the local spatial coordinate along an unperturbed magnetic-field line). Since the right side of Eq. 5.11 is
we can introduce the non-adiabatic decomposition (Chen and Tsai, 1983)
where the non-adiabatic contribution δG satisfies the perturbed non-adiabatic Vlasov equation
Next, since the background plasma is time independent and axisymmetric, and the unperturbed guiding-center Vlasov distribution is independent of the gyroangle, we perform Fourier transforms in (φ, ζ, t) so that Eq. 5.15 becomes
where the amplitudes
In order to remove the dependence of the perturbed Hamiltonian
In order to obtain an integral solution for
where
is defined in terms of the lower (L) turning point
where the constant amplitude
which yields
where
We note that cot Θ in Eq. 5.21 has singularities at nπ, which immediately leads to the resonance condition Eq. 5.9.
Now that the solution
which requires us to evaluate
where, using the Plemelj formula with the identity
This expression completes the derivation of the quasilinear diffusion tensor Eq. 5.8 and the perturbed Hamiltonian
We now make a few remarks concerning the bounce-averaged wave-particle resonance condition Eq. 5.9. First, in the case of a uniform magnetized plasma (with the drift frequency ωd ≡ 0), we substitute the eikonal representations
If we now evaluate this integral by stationary-phase methods (Stix, 1992), the dominant contribution comes from points s0 along a magnetic-field line where
which yields the local wave-particle resonance condition, provided v‖(s0) ≠ 0 (i.e., the local resonance does not occur at a turning point).
6 Summary
In the present paper, we have established a direct connection between the standard reference of quasilinear theory for a uniform magnetized plasma by Kennel and Engelmann (Kennel and Engelmann, 1966) and its Hamiltonian formulation in guiding-center phase space. We have also shown that the transition to a quasilinear theory for a nonuniform magnetized plasma is greatly facilitated within a Hamiltonian formulation. The main features of a Hamiltonian formulation of quasilinear theory is that the quasilinear diffusion tensor has a simple modular dyadic form in which a matrix of Fourier indices is multiplied by a single quasilinear scalar potential, which includes the resonant wave-particle delta function. This simple modular is observed in the case of a uniform magnetized plasma, as seen in Eq. 4.18, as well as in the case of a nonuniform magnetized plasma, as seen in Eq. 5.8. In particular, we note that the quasilinear diffusion tensor Eq. 5.8 naturally incorporates quasilinear radial diffusion as well as its synergistic connections to diffusion in two-dimensional invariant velocity space. These features are easily extended to the quasilinear diffusion of relativistic charged particles that are magnetically confined by nonuniform magnetic fields.
Author contributions
AB has written 90% of the manuscript. AC has added technical references as well as historical context.
Funding
This work was partially funded by grants from (AB) NSF-PHY 2206302 and (AC) NASA NNX17AI15G and 80NSSC21K1323.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
Supplementary material
The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fspas.2022.1010133/full#supplementary-material
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Keywords: quasilinear theory, guiding-center approximation, wave-particle resonance, Hamiltonian formulation, action-angle coordinates
Citation: Brizard AJ and Chan AA (2022) Hamiltonian formulations of quasilinear theory for magnetized plasmas. Front. Astron. Space Sci. 9:1010133. doi: 10.3389/fspas.2022.1010133
Received: 02 August 2022; Accepted: 22 August 2022;
Published: 06 October 2022.
Edited by:
Oliver Allanson, University of Exeter, United KingdomReviewed by:
Anton Artemyev, University of California, Los Angeles, United StatesCopyright © 2022 Brizard and Chan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Alain J. Brizard, abrizard@smcvt.edu