Paper detail

Long velocity tails in plasmas and gravitational systems

Long tails in the velocity distribution are observed in plasmas and gravitational systems. Some experiments and observations in far-from-equilibrium conditions show that these tails behave as 1/v^(5/2). We show here that such heavy tails are due to a universal mechanism related to the fluctuations of the total force field. Owing to the divergence in 1/r^2 of the binary interaction force, these fluctuations can be very large and their probability density exhibits a similar long tail. They induce large velocity fluctuations leading to the 1/v^(5/2) tail. We extract the mechanism causing these properties from the BBGKY hierarchy representation of Statistical Mechanics. This leads to a modification of the Vlasov equation by an additional term. The novel term involves a fractional power 3/4 of the Laplacian in velocity space and a fractional iterated time integral. Solving the new kinetic equation for a uniform system, we retrieve the observed 1/v^(5/2) tail for the velocity distribution. These results are confirmed by molecular dynamics simulations.