Landau Damping In Kaniadakis And Tsallis Distributed Electron Plasmas

The damping arrest and saturation stages in the evolution of the electric field amplitude are characteristic imprint of the nonlinear Landau damping. Scaling laws for the wave amplitudes and times and critical parameters which separate the monotonic damping from nondamping regimes are well known for Maxwellian and Tsallis-like plasmas. Here, the properties of electrostatic waves in unmagnetized, collisionless, and non-Maxwellian electron plasmas are studied by taking into account the alpha-deformed Kaniadakis distribution and compared with results using the q-Tsallis formalism. It is checked that the damping arrest and saturation characteristics scale as power-laws for the alpha-Kaniadakis, similarly as for the q-Tsallis parameter, indicating that a universal behaviour exists for the transition between linear and non-linear regimes. It is shown that the damping of electrostatic waves is much weaker when using Kaniadakis distributions, even in situations where this distribution exhibits more enhanced high-velocity tails. Furthermore, it is observed that in cases where the Tsallis distribution damps out completely the initial perturbation, the equivalent Kaniadakis distributed plasmas still support particle trapping, or even if wider Kaniadakis distributions are used. This important signature may provide a new tool to diagnose the nature of the distribution function and its relation to wave measurements in laboratory and space plasmas. Published by AIP Publishing.