Kappa Distributions: Theory and Applications in Space Plasmas
By V. Pierrard, M. Lazar. 2010
670 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The plasma particle velocity distributions observed in the solar wind generally show enhanced (non-Maxwellian) suprathermal tails, decreasing as a power law of the velocity and well described by the family of Kappa distribution functions. The presence of non-thermal populations at different altitudes in space plasmas suggests a universal mechanism for their creation and important consequences concerning plasma fluctuations, the resonant and nonresonant wave – particle acceleration and plasma heating. These effects are well described by the kinetic approaches where no closure requires the distributions to be nearly Maxwellian. This paper summarizes and analyzes the various theories proposed for the Kappa distributions and their valuable applications in coronal and space plasmas.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8a885c71bbb27971543af49481912b77f8cc16fd
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Citations in the corpus
- INVARIANT KAPPA DISTRIBUTION IN SPACE PLASMAS OUT OF EQUILIBRIUM (2011, background): “…such as the solar wind (e.g., Chotoo et al. 2000; Mann et al. 2002; Zouganelis et al. 2004; Leubner & Vörös 2005; Marsch 2006; Yoon et al. 2006; Pierrard & Lazar 2010) and the planetary magnetospheres (e.g., Christon 1987; Mauk et al. 2004; Schippers et al. 2008; Dialynas et al. 2009), in…”
- Frenesy: Time-symmetric dynamical activity in nonequilibria (2019, background): “That is what really happens in space plasmas where those kappa-distributions (7) have indeed been observed and are well established, [30].”