Electromagnetic interactions of non-Maxwellian plasmas

The velocity distribution function of the EBT ring electrons is expected to be highly non-Maxwellian, and an investigation of the consequence of this fact with respect to emission, absorption, and transport of radiation is underway. A study of the emission of synchrotron radiation suggests that the angular distribution of the radiation may be a useful diagnostic for studying the anisotropy of the underlying plasma. We are also interested in the absorptive properties of the plasma and have recently developed a computer code which calculates the absorption coefficient for a model class of non-Maxwellian distributions. The first application has been to calculating the absorption coefficients at the first and second harmonics, and initial results indicate that anisotropy tends to increase the absorption coefficient of the extraordinary mode. Further studies both at higher frequencies, and for non-Maxwellian energy distributions will be carried out