Equivalence and Unification of the Ballistic and the Kinetic Treatment of Collisional Absorption

In this work two important models of treating collisional absorption in a laser driven plasma are compared, the kinetic and the ballistic model. We will see that there exists a remarkable connection between these basic approaches which could give a hint how to overcome the inherent limitations. In our work we will follow at first the classical and the quantum kinetic approach based on the first and the second equation of the BBGKY(Bogoliubov, Born, Green, Kirkwood, Yvon)-hierarchy. The hierarchy will be closed using the random phase approximation (RPA).We extend this approximation with the help of the ballistic model which includes strong two-body collisions. It is our main concern to achieve a single expression for the time-averaged collisional absorption rate valid in a large parameter region which no longer includes integrals or sums over an infinite range. Such an expression is still missing in the literature. Mostly the publications end up with expressions which are still very complicated. Only asymptotic approximations of those are presented in form of standard Coulomb logarithms