Direct path from microscopic mechanics to Debye shielding, Landau damping and wave-particle interaction
The derivation of Debye shielding and Landau damping from the N-body description of plasmas is performed directly by using Newton’s second law for the N-body system. This is done in a few steps with elementary calculations using standard tools of calculus and no probabilistic setting. Unexpectedly, Debye shielding is encountered together with Landau damping. This approach is shown to be justified in the one-dimensional case when the number of particles in a Debye sphere becomes large. The theory is extended to accommodate a correct description of trapping and chaos due to Langmuir waves. On top of their well-known production of collisional transport, the repulsive deflections of electrons are shown to produce shielding, in such a way that each particle is shielded by all other ones, while keeping in uninterrupted motion.
Particle systems and nonlinear Landau dampinga)
Some works dealing with the long-time behavior of interacting particle systems are reviewed and put into perspective, with focus on the classical Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser theory and recent results of Landau damping in the nonlinear perturbative regime, obtained in collaboration with Clement Mouhot. Analogies are discussed, as well as new qualitative insights in the theory. Finally, the connection with a more recent work on the inviscid Landau damping near the Couette shear flow, by Bedrossian and Masmoudi, is briefly discussed.
Time behavior of gas pressure and PD activity in insulation cavities under AC voltage
In the framework of developing defect-based life models (i.e. the life model of partial discharge-induced damage growth from a micro-void in polymer matrix), ageing tests were performed on PE layered specimens with artificial cavities under constant gas pressure and constant gas volume conditions, respectively. Time behavior of the discharge repetition rate and amplitude were recorded and compared under these two conditions. Results show that pressure variation has little influence on PD activities at constant gas volume. Under constant gas pressure, the evolution of gas volume has similar characteristic to the product of discharge amplitude and repetition rate.