Equivalence and unification of the ballistic and the kinetic treatment of collisional absorption [Elektronische Ressource] / von Ralf Schneider

Equivalence and Unification of the Ballistic and the KineticTreatment of Collisional AbsorptionVom Fachbereich Physikder Technischen Universit¨at Darmstadtzur Erlangung des Gradeseines Doktors der Naturwissenschaften(Dr. rer. nat.)genehmigte Dissertation vonDipl. -Phys. Ralf Schneideraus DarmstadtReferent: Prof. Dr. P. MulserKorreferent: Prof. Dr. P. ManakosTag der Einreichung: 13.2.2002Tag der Prufung:¨ 24.4.2002Darmstadt 2002D171“A reasonable starting point for a discussion of the many-body problem mightbe the question of how many bodies are required before we have a problem.Prof. G. E. Brown has pointed out that, for those interested in exact solutions,this can be answered by a look at history. In eighteenth-century Newtonian me-chanics, the three-body problem was insoluble. With the birth of general relativityaround 1910 and quantum electrodynamics in 1930, the two- and one-body prob-lems became insoluble. And within modern quantum field theory, the problemof zero bodies (vacuum) is insoluble. So, if we are out after exact solutions, nobodies at all is already too many.”[Richard D. Mattuck, A Guide to Feynman Diagrams in the Many-Body Problem]In this work two important models of treating collisional absorption in a laser drivenplasma are compared, the kinetic and the ballistic model. We will see that there existsa remarkable connection between these basic approaches which could give a hint how toovercome the inherent limitations.