Causality and Collisionless Damping in Plasma

Abstract

We derive the collisionless Landau damping in a plasma by satisfying the causal requirement that the susceptibility function of the plasma for time t < 0 should be nil. The causality condition should be satisfied by the susceptibility function of a plasma no matter what equations we employ to describe the plasma. Thus we conclude that the fundamental reason of the collisionless damping can be traced to the causality. As an example, we derive the collisionless damping of ion acoustic wave in a plasma by employing fluid equations.