Introduction to Plasma Physics

Contents: 1. Plasma in nature and in laboratory systems. 2. Statistics of weekly ionized gas. 3. The ideal plasma. 4. Elementary process in plasma. 5. Formation and decomposition of charged particles in weakly ionized gas. 6. Physical kinetics of gas and plasma. 7. Transport phenomena in weakly ionized gas. 8. Transport of charged particles in weakly ionized gas. 9. Plasma in external fields. 10. Wave in a plasma. 11. Radiation in gas, plasma of the upper atmosphere. Appendices. Bibliography.

The book aims at providing a concise yet general description of the physics of weakly onized plasma so that a budding engineer or chemist can obtain a general understanding of the phenomena occurring in the plasma of a laboratory setting. The book extensively employs various evaluative techniques, which show the dependence of the result on the parameters of the problem and give its value within order of magnitude. Moreover, for some functions only their limiting values are determined or simple assumptions are made to find these functions. There methods yield a correct qualitative picture of the subject and considerably simplify the discussion. However, the simplicity of discussion is essentially thought-provoking and creates a profound understanding of the subject. Presentation provided in this book gives engineering students the fundamentals of the plasma physics, which will be needed when working with plasma-containing systems.