Steady-state uniform Debye sheaths

The Debye sheaths which nearly always appear near solid elements in contact with a plasma are such 'reliable structures' that they are not considered by researchers in the overwhelming majority of cases. The paradoxical result is that much less is known about the behavior of Debye sheaths under actual conditions than is known about the behavior of many other, much more exotic plasma formations. In the present paper the author assumes that the surface of the insulator is flat and uniform, and he assumes that the Debye sheath is in a steady state. He examines the conditions for the existence of Debye sheath in a fairly general formulations, in which the electron distribution function contains groups of electrons with energies var-epsilon > var-epsilon *. He assumes that the plasma density is so low that particle collisions in the sheath can be ignored