Slowing-in distribution of energetic charged particles released in infinite Maxwellian thermonuclear plasmas: Classical regime. Pt. 2

The time-dependent slowing-in distribution has been evaluated for a fast beam of test particles released in an infinite Maxwellian plasma background in the quantum-mechanical scattering regime. The treatment is extended here to the classical scattering regime and results are compared with those obtained based on quantum-mechanical considerations. Also, the total energy distribution is obtained and normalized, and ranges of validity are determined. The classical calculations are of the Boltzmann type which is consistent with binary scattering models. The slowing-in distributions are estimated from solutions of the Fokker-Planck and the Lenard-Balescu equations and, as expected, the results are in agreement with those obtained from the Blotzmann equation. The Boltzmann formulation developed here can be readily extended to take advantage of well developed, multi-energy group neutron codes to numerically calculate more accurate results for the energy distributions of energetic particles with consideration of leakage and absorption effects. (orig.)