Propagation and damping of electromagnetic waves in non-maxwellian plasmas near the ion cyclotron frequency

Abstract

In radio-frequency heating of plasmas, the launched wave undergoes tunneling, reflection, mode conversion, and damping near the resonance layer. The single-pass scattering parameters can be estimated from the mode conversion tunneling equation, which has been previously studied for Maxwellian plasmas. In this work, the mode conversion tunneling analysis is extended to include non-Maxwellian velocity distributions near the ion cyclotron frequency. The derived wave equation is applied to analyze propagation and damping in the minority heating regime with the distribution functions obtained from the Fokker-Plank equation. Additionally, the effects of the velocity distribution, in comparison with an approximate Maxwellian distribution, are investigated.