Parametric Excitation of Coupled Waves. II. Parametric Plasmon-Photon Interaction

Abstract

The general theory of the parametric excitation of coupled waves developed in the preceding paper is applied to the parametric interaction of the electrostatic waves in a plasma with radiation whose frequency is close to the electron plasma frequency. On the basis of the hydrodynamic equations, the coupled equations for the electron plasma wave and ion acoustic wave are derived. The effect of the Landau damping is also considered phenomenologically. Using the coupled wave equations, the expressions for the threshold radiation intensity, the frequency shift at the threshold and the growth rate above threshold are obtained. In particular, the dependence of these quantities on the wave-length of the electrostatic waves is discussed in detail. The results are compared with experiment of Stern and Tzoar.