Self-focusing of an intense optical beam in a plasma is studied, including the nonlinear effects of both the relativistic electron mass and the ponderomotive potential due to the electromagnetic wave. An exact steady-state asymptotic solution of beam propagation in a localized solitary waveform is obtained in slab geometry. Amplitude-width scaling relations are obtained, which imply that the wi...

Abstract A two-dimensional, full-wave, frequency domain, cold plasma model is used to study electromagnetic power propagation and absorption in a helicon thruster, including its far plume region surrounding space. Results show that fraction of absorbed the region, deposition source essentially unperturbed by simulation domain size, presence metallic obstacles, or density environment. An electro...

By means of the study on electromagnetic (EM) waves propagating along the plasma column, it is found that the radiation of a plasma column is caused by two kinds of operation modes. The first one is a guided mode which leads to a surface current radiation, and its operation condition is obtained by boundary conditions and physical properties of plasma. The second one is a leaky mode which resul...

Propagation and absorption of electromagnetic waves with electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) frequency are experimentally and theoretically investigated for the case of inhomogeneously magnetized plasma column with peripheral vacuum layer, when a left-hand polarized wave (LHPW) is selectively launched. The polarization reversal from the LHPW to the right-hand polarized wave is found to occur nea...

Investigated in this thesis are the excitation and observation of Langmuir wave turbulence caused by the parametric decay instability (PDI) in high-frequency space plasma heating experiments conducted at the NSF/DoD High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) facility in Gakona, Alaska during the spring and summer of 2006. The PDI is the decay of an electromagnetic (EM) wave into an ...

Investigated in this thesis are the excitation and observation of Langmuir wave turbulence caused by the parametric decay instability (PDI) in high-frequency space plasma heating experiments conducted at the NSF/DoD High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) facility in Gakona, Alaska during the spring and summer of 2006. The PDI is the decay of an electromagnetic (EM) wave into an ...

A whistler wave is a very low frequency electromagnetic wave generated by lightning discharges. As the electromagnetic wave travels through the plasma environments of the ionosphere and magnetosphere, it undergoes dispersion of a several thousand kilohertz. Because the propagation velocity decreases with frequency, the lower frequency components of the wave arrive later than the higher frequenc...

New solutions to the coupled three-wave equations in a nonuniform plasma medium are presented that include both space and time dependence of the waves. By including the dominant nonlinear frequency shift of the material wave, it is shown that if the driving waves are sufficiently strong in relation to the medium gradient , a nonlinearly phase-locked solution develops that is characteristic of a...

We show both theoretically and experimentally that an electromagnetic wave can be totally absorbed by an overdense plasma when a subwavelength diffraction grating is placed in front of the plasma surface. The absorption is due to dissipation of surface plasma waves (plasmons polaritons) that have been resonantly excited by the evanescent component of the diffracted electromagnetic wave. The dev...