Effect of electron temperature on formation of travelling waves in plasma: Kinetic and hydrodynamic models

Abstract The kinetic formulation of the model problem of plasma waves excitation by a powerful short laser pulse is numerically studied for the first time. Kinetic and simplest hydrodynamic plasma models are also compared for the problem under consideration. It is shown that the considered hydrodynamic models do not provide good approximations to the solution to the Vlasov kinetic equation, namely, one leads to discontinuous solutions and the other has a significant qualitative distinction. At a low plasma temperature, the effect of non-isothermicity of the process is small, but it can lead to significant distortions of the solution during further heating. The results obtained here imply that the first two moments of the distribution function are not enough to describe the plasma hydrodynamics; higher-order moments should be used.