Thermalization of the mildly relativistic plasma

Understand

In the recent Letter [1] we considered the approach of nonequilibrium pair plasma towards thermal equilibrium state adopting a kinetic treatment and solving numerically the relativistic Boltzmann equations.

• It was shown that plasma in the energy range 0.1-10 MeV first reaches kinetic equilibrium, on a timescale t_{k}<10^{-14} sec, with detailed balance between binary interactions such as Compton, Bhabha and Moller scattering, and pair production and annihilation.
• Later the electron-positron-photon plasma approaches thermal equilibrium on a timescale t_{th}<10^{-12} sec, with detailed balance for all direct and inverse reactions.
• In the present paper we systematically present details of the computational scheme used in [1], as well as generalize our treatment, considering proton loading of the pair plasma.