Paper detail

Alphonons as the quanta of the Alfvén waves

In a magnetized plasma, both the transverse and longitudinal Alfvén waves carry an average energy density that, for each mode of oscillation, resembles the classical energy of a harmonic oscillator with unit mass and angular frequency that depends on the background magnetic field and plasma density. We employ this fact to introduce a pair of canonical variables for the underlying classical system, and then use the canonical quantization procedure to express the Alfvén wave velocity (or the corresponding plasma displacement vector) in terms of creation and annihilation operators. We thus introduce the concept of Alphonons as the quanta for the Alfvén wave packets and study their characteristic features. The corresponding quanta (Alphonons) carry spin one for the transverse Alfvén wave and spin zero for the longitudinal Alfvén wave. We obtained behavior of thermodynamic quantities for an Alphonon system (e.g., free energy, entropy, specific heat). We showed that for the Alphonon system the spectral energy density obeys the Planck's black body radiation law.