Tuesday, August 7, 2018

astrophysics - What defines a cold plasma?


Been looking for this very simple answer for a while now, and google returns a face cream with the words cold plasma in it. Very frustrated.


Just wondering, what constitutes a cold plasma in the sense of the energies of the electrons and the energy of photons. Are we looking at non-relativistic photons and the electron velocities being quite slow? i.e.,


$$ \beta<<\frac{h\nu}{mc^2}<<1 $$


Or are we looking at mildly fast electrons,


$$ \frac{h\nu}{mc^2}<<\beta<<1 $$




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