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Landau Damping of Electrostatic Waves in Arbitrarily Degenerate Quantum Plasmas

We carry out a systematic study of the dispersion relation for linear electrostatic waves in an arbitrarily degenerate quantum electron plasma. We solve for the complex frequency spectrum for arbitrary values of wavenumber $k$ and level of degeneracy $μ$. Our finding is that for large $k$ and high $μ$ the real part of the frequency $ω_{r}$ grows linearly with $k$ and scales with $μ$ only because of the scaling of the Fermi energy. In this regime the relative Landau damping rate $γ/ω_{r}$ becomes independent of $k$ and varies inversly with $μ$. Thus, damping is weak but finite at moderate levels of degeneracy for short wavelengths.