Photoabsorption in a plasma in a high magnetic field

Understand

Photo-absorption in fully ionized plasmas in high magnetic fields is re-examined, using the methods of many-body quantum field theory.

• For frequencies in the immediate vicinity of the electron cyclotron resonance the rates we obtain disagree markedly from those in the literature.
• The new element in our work that causes most of the disagreement is the inclusion of the lowest order real part of the energy-shift of the resonant state, where, in effect, previous authors had included only the imaginary part.
• In a region around and below the proton cyclotron resonance our results also disagree with those of previous authors, for a number of reasons.