Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-kinetic-theory-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2023/2/b/solution
Past exam of the kinetic theory course of the University of Oxford 2023 2 b Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-25
There is no Landau damping of this branch within the completely degenerate collisionless model. Its phase velocity obeys , while each parallel marginal distribution vanishes outside . There are no particles at the resonant velocity, and . The Landau contour consequently contributes no imaginary part to the dielectric function; a real root is allowed with .
If a small nonzero temperature supplied a tail beyond the Fermi surface, the conclusion would change: the resonant derivative would generally be nonzero. For the convention and a simple weakly damped root, expanding the continued dielectric function would give . This conditional formula is not needed to manufacture damping for the exact cutoff. Neither collisional attenuation nor nonlinear evolution is included in the given dispersion relation.
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