Kinetic theory of acoustic-like modes in nonextensive pair plasmas

The low-frequency acoustic-like modes in a pair plasma (electron-positron or pair-ion) is studied by employing a kinetic theory model based on the Vlasov and Poisson’s equations with emphasizing the Tsallis’s nonextensive statistics. The possibility of the acoustic-like modes and their properties in both fully symmetric and temperature-asymmetric cases are examined by studying the dispersion relation, Landau damping and instability of modes. The resultant dispersion relation in this study is compatible with the acoustic branch of the experimental data (Oohara et al. in Phys. Rev. Lett. 95:175003, 2005) in which the electrostatic waves have been examined in a pure pair-ion plasma. Particularly, our study reveals that the occurrence of growing or damped acoustic-like modes depends strongly on the nonextensivity of the system as a measure for describing the long-range Coulombic interactions and correlations in the plasma. The mechanism that leads to the unstable modes lies in the heart of the nonextensive formalism yet, the mechanism of damping is the same developed by Landau. Furthermore, the solutions of acoustic-like waves in an equilibrium Maxwellian pair plasma are recovered in the extensive limit (q→1), where the acoustic modes have only the Landau damping and no growth.