Recombination of a coulomb plasma and nonbinary interaction effects

Abstract

A theory has been constructed for the recombination of a Coulomb plasma with allowance for the anomalous nature of diffusion along the energy axis in the negative energy region of Coulomb particles. These anomalies, which were revealed earlier by first-principles numerical simulation, are due to the dynamic memory of a classical Coulomb plasma. Two kinetic models are presented. The first takes random collisions with a hypothetical gas of two-level atoms into account. Comparison of the results of this model with first-principles calculations shows that the characteristic of the diffusion coefficients is missing. The second model takes the discrete nature of bound states into account. Calculations show that for an electron-hole plasma the recombination rate deviates substantially from the results of conventional theory only when either the recombination time is very short or the effect is masked by radiative recombination. For ion-ion plasma, the deviations from conventional recombination theory run to several orders of magnitude. This is of interest in relation to ball lightning.