Formation of Maxwellian Tails
- 10 May 1976
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Physical Society (APS) in Physical Review Letters
- Vol. 36 (19), 1107-1109
- https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.36.1107
Abstract
Using two models, we study the relaxation to a Maxwell distribution in the context of classical kinetic theory. For the first model, an exact solution of the nonlinear Boltzmann equation is derived. For the second model, an asymptotic solution exhibits the remarkable feature of a transient tail population sometimes much larger than the equilibrium Maxwell distribution. This phenomenon may be of importance for calculating rates of fast chemical reactions and for controlled thermonuclear fusion.Keywords
This publication has 3 references indexed in Scilit:
- Solar Neutrinos: A Scientific PuzzleScience, 1976
- Solar models of low neutrino-counting rate - The depleted Maxwellian tailThe Astrophysical Journal, 1975
- Reaction Kinetics in Stochastic ModelsThe Journal of Chemical Physics, 1971