Quantum plasmadynamics. Magnetized plasmas. (Q715035)

The author's earlier book [Quantum plasmadynamics. Unmagnetized plasmas. New York, NY: Springer (2008; Zbl 1158.82001)] was devoted to the covariant relativistic theory of quantum plasmas without taking into account the effects of the external magnetic field. This is done now here. The book is organized into nine chapters. The first four treat the covariant fluid models for magnetized plasmas. A covariant form of the cold plasma is given, together with MHD and the kinetic theory. Besides, the question of response tensors for magnetic plasmas is studied up to the question of nonlinear response. The problems of wave phenomena are investigated in sufficient details. After an introduction to dispersion, cool electron-ion plasmas, cold electron plasmas, weakly relativistic thermal plasmas, pulsar plasmas are studied in detail. This group of chapters ends with the investigation of gyromagnetic processes (cyclotron emission, synchroton emission, Thomson scattering). The next part develops using the solutions of the Dirac equation for the magnetized electron a magnetized version of quantum electrodynamics. This theory is used to study the quantum theory of the gyromagnetic process (when pair creation is taken into account; the quantum theory of cyclotron emission, and of synchrotron emission is concisely expounded; when the positronium production in the strong magnetic field is outlined). A separate chapter deals with the second-order gyromagnetic process. An interesting chapter is devoted to the magnetized vacuum, where linear response theory is used. Here, the Schwinger's proper time method is described, the theory of the electromagnetic wrench is outlined, the strongly magnetized vacuum is introduced and the problem of photon splitting is studied. The final chapter is devoted to the response of a magnetized electron gas. Here the relativistic plasma dispersion functions are introduced and applied to magnetized thermal electron distributions. The special and limiting cases of the response tensors are calculated and the response of a spin-polarized electron gas is studied. Finally, nonlinear response tensors are introduced and discussed up to the cubic ones. The book ends with appendices containing the special functions and Dirac matrices used.