Derivation of the Boltzmann equation

Klimontovich equation approach

There are two main ways to derive the Boltzmann equation for a plasma. The first deals with the exact density of particles in the six-dimensional phase space (r; v). Consider a single particle whose orbit in this space is, ( (t), (t)). The density" of this particle is
( )=

[r-

(t)][v - (t)]

(1)

where is Dirac's delta function. Summing over all particles of a given species we get the density function for that species. Writing the equation of motion under the Lorentz force for each particle and summing over particles of a given species leads to the Klimontovich equation for , + V. + ( ). (2)

This is still a very detailed equation containing exact information about the orbits of all particles. is composed of sums of -functions which makes practical calculations cumbersome. As we are not interested in the orbits of individual particles, we can take ensemble averages of and of equation (2). Denoting the average of (r, v, t) by (r, v, t) and neglecting the particle collisions, the ensemble averaging of (2) leads to the Vlasov equation for , ( ) (3)

Liouville equation approach

The second approach starts with distribution functions and avoids functions and ensemble averaging. Consider a general distribution of N particles ( ) which is normalized as, .

For a plasma of ions and electrons in thermodynamic equilibrium F = D, where D is the Gibbs distribution of the previous section. The penalty of avoiding -functions is to deal with a 6N-dimensional phase space. F contains information of all particles and is much too detailed for practical use. A set of reduced distribution functions can be defined as follows. The one-particle distribution function for species is, ( ) (4) . . Thetwo-particle distribution

V is the finite spatial volume where F is non-zero for all function is,

(5)

and so on. Statistical physics tells us that F fulfils the Liouville equation, ( ) (6)

Where is the acceleration by all forces and interactions, including collisions. The equation of motion for is found by integrating (6) over all coordinates except ( ), (7)

Here the total number of particles was assumed to be conserved. If there are external forces only, we again get the Liouville equation, (8) Denote the interactions between particles by ( ) . We could write a similar equation for that then depends . Now the third term of (7) reduces to,

Note that (7) is not a closed equation for on , and so on.

This is called the BBGKY hierarchy (Bogoliubov, Born, Green, Kirkwood, Yvon). In higher orders this hierarchy becomes intractable and the series must be truncated using physical arguments. We do it by approxi mating . If the interactions between particles were strong and of short range (as in ordinary gases) we would end up with the Boltzmann equation, ( ) (9)

However, in a plasma the dominating interaction is the long-range Coulomb force that is relatively weak! Fortunately, in plasma the combined effect of remote charges is, on the average, stronger than the acceleration due to the nearest neighbor. The average acceleration is from the viewpoint of a single particle the same as the acceleration by external (Coulomb) forces Thus we can replace ( ) ( .

. The effect of actual binary collisions is, ) (10)

Assuming that the only external force is the Lorentz force we have the Boltzmann equation for plasma, ( ) (11)

where the average fields

and

fulfil the average, i.e., macroscopic, Maxwell equations,

Note that the normalization of

is different from the normalization of the distribution function ( )

in the

Vlasov equation (3). We retain the same plasma kinetic equation by substitution

A complete treatment of the collision term is extremely difficult. The interparticle collisions may be of very variable nature; they may be elastic but energy may also be transferred to internal energy of neutral particles or molecular ions of the plasma. Furthermore, there are collisions leading to recombination, ionization, and charge exchange. A simple and often sufficient first approximation of the collision term is the relaxation time approximation, also called the Krook model where the average collision frequency is approximated by a constant and, ( ) ( ) (12)

| where f0 is the equilibrium distribution and | . Note that the equilibrium here is a wider concept than a Maxwellian distribution. It is enough that f0 allows for a stable solution of the Vlasov equation.

Derivation of macroscopic equations

The method to derive macroscopic (configuration space) variables from the microscopic (6-dimensional phase space) distribution function is to take ve- locity moments. In this section we derive macroscopic equations by taking velocity moments of the Boltzmann equation. For many space applications we could as well start from the Vlasov equation but retaining the collision term gives us a more complete macroscopic theory. When not needed, the collision terms are easy to neglect later. We thus start from the Boltzmann equation (BE) for species , ( ) ( ) (13)

http://theory.physics.helsinki.fi/~plasma_jatko/asp2010/ASP10_Ch3.pdf