Dynamics of one-dimensional plasmas including short range interactions

Single species, one-dimensional plasma models suffer from the fact that there is no mechanism to relax the distribution function without taking into account triple correlations. An attempt has been made to provide such a mechanism by introducing short range interactions between the particles of the plasma. It may be noted that one-dimensional two body collisions do not affect the distribution function because of energy-momentum conservation. Three-body collisions are not subject to such a restriction and a one-dimensional three-body interaction is solvable in principle by reducing the problem to a two dimensional system with a fixed force. The Fokker Plank coefficients have been found for a model which consists of an electron plasma, infinitely heavy ions and square well forces between the electrons. Properties such as the electron-electron autocorrelation function for the plasma at equilibrium and the relaxation of the distribution function have been investigated. Theoretical results have been compared with those of a computer simulation of the model using a total of 300 particles. A very good agreement has been obtained for the plasma with the short range interactions in spite of the limited number of particles used