Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 March 2009
The suppression of runaway electrons in a Lorentz plasma is demonstrated for a two-component, fully ionized plasma in the presence of a high frequency, weak, uniform electric field. The time for runaway to occur for electric field frequencies high compared to the collision frequency is longer than the runaway time for low electric field frequencies or zero frequency, by the ratio of the frequency of the electric field to the collision frequency squared. Both the resolvant method developed by Prigogine and co-workers and the double perturbation scheme of the Poincaré—Lighthill method are employed to derive the diffusion equation for the modified one-particle distribution function in the collision-dominated region of velocity space.