Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A plasma is a gas of ionized particles. For a dilute plasma of very high temperature, the collisions can be ignored. Such situations occur, for example, in nuclear fusion devices and space plasmas. The Vlasov-Poisson and Vlasov-Maxwell equations are kinetic models for such collisionless plasmas. The Vlasov-Poisson equation is also used for galaxy evolution. I will describe some mathematical results on these models, including well-posedness and stability issues.