Fast electrons relaxing: Difference between revisions
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== James Clerk Maxwell == | == James Clerk Maxwell == | ||
James Clerk Maxwell first wrote down the distribution of velocities in a gas of fixed temperature, a contribution to theoretical physics that most of us now use routinely, without reflection, on a daily basis. The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution represents a state of maximum entropy, the overwhelmingly most likely state given that the temperature of the gas has been fixed. It is such a standard ingredient of our thinking about gases and plasmas that "non-maxwellian" is one of the trendiest words you can use. A non-maxwellian distribution is of course what we would expect to find in a coronal hard X- | [http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Maxwell.html James Clerk Maxwell] first wrote down the distribution of velocities in a gas of fixed temperature, a contribution to theoretical physics that most of us now use routinely, without reflection, on a daily basis. The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution represents a state of maximum entropy, the overwhelmingly most likely state given that the temperature of the gas has been fixed. It is such a standard ingredient of our thinking about gases and plasmas that "non-maxwellian" is one of the trendiest words you can use. A non-maxwellian distribution is of course what we would expect to find in a coronal hard X-ray source, like the one [http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010ApJ...714.1108K Säm Krucker has described]. How would it relax to Maxwellian form? Might we recognise this in observations? How efficient is it as a source of hard X-rays? Ross Galloway, Per Helander, John Brown and I have been thinking about this [http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010arXiv1003.3263G here] and I'll describe some of what we've been doing and why it might be interesting for solar hard X-rays. First some more non-maxwellian words. | ||
Revision as of 19:07, 16 August 2010
James Clerk Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell first wrote down the distribution of velocities in a gas of fixed temperature, a contribution to theoretical physics that most of us now use routinely, without reflection, on a daily basis. The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution represents a state of maximum entropy, the overwhelmingly most likely state given that the temperature of the gas has been fixed. It is such a standard ingredient of our thinking about gases and plasmas that "non-maxwellian" is one of the trendiest words you can use. A non-maxwellian distribution is of course what we would expect to find in a coronal hard X-ray source, like the one Säm Krucker has described. How would it relax to Maxwellian form? Might we recognise this in observations? How efficient is it as a source of hard X-rays? Ross Galloway, Per Helander, John Brown and I have been thinking about this here and I'll describe some of what we've been doing and why it might be interesting for solar hard X-rays. First some more non-maxwellian words.