Characteristics of synchrotron Čerenkov radiation

Abstract

A diagrammatic technique has been worked out in the framework of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics as developed by Prigogine and co-workers to tackle the problem of radiation emission from a relativistic electron in an ambient plasma embedding an axial-wiggler magnetic field. The theory is exact in that the diagrams contributing towards the self-consistent-field approximation have been summed up exactly and one obtains a time-dependent response function. The kinetic regime has been obtained by eliminating the memory by taking an asymptotic limit in time. Explicit calculations have been affected to obtain functions like the Čerenkov angle and the refractive index as well as the power emitted by the system. It has been shown that the radiation emitted has very peculiar polarization features.