Plasma Astrophysics | S. A. Kaplan, V. N. Tsytovich

The authors considered the task of writing a book in which fairly complicated topics would be presented, if possible, in an intelligible form without sacrificing the exactness and generality of a qualitative description of the physics of the various phenomena and their mathematical formulation. The book is not intended solely for astrophysicists. The problems of the theory of the interaction of fast particles with a plasma, their radiation, and the behaviour of a plasma in a very strong magnetic field are of interest also for the study of laboratory plasmas.

The first chapter of the book gives at a relatively elementary, but physically rigorous, level the general ideas of the nature of collective plasma processes and ofplasma turbulence, using the method of elementary excitations, developed by one of the authors and expounded in more detail in other monographs (Tsytovich, 1970, 1971a, 1972b). This chapter serves essentially as an introduction to the other three chapters which contain the main contents of the book and are devoted to the actual analysis of plasma processes on the Sun (Chapter 2), in objects such as galactic nuclei and quasars (Chapter 3) and in pulsars (Chapter 4). The authors have attempted to write the general theoretical part of these chapters independent of the actual estimates, bearing in mind possible future applications of the theory and probable new astrophysical discoveries. The same purpose is also served by the detailed tables of the probabilities of various processes in the Appendix—where we also indicate methods to apply them—where we have given in a convenient form also the probabilities which were not directly used in the book.