Landau damping below survival threshold

Abstract

In this paper, we establish nonlinear Landau damping below survival threshold for collisionless charged particles following the meanfield Vlasov theory near general radial equilibria. In absence of collisions, the long-range Coulomb pair interaction between particles self-consistently gives rise to oscillations, known in the physical literature as plasma oscillations or Langmuir's oscillatory waves, that disperse in space like a Klein-Gordon's dispersive wave. As a matter of fact, there is a non-trivial survival threshold of wave numbers that characterizes the large time dynamics of a plasma: {\em phase mixing} above the threshold driven by the free transport dynamics and {\em plasma oscillations} below the threshold driven by the collective meanfield interaction. The former mechanism provides exponential damping, while the latter is much slower and dictated by Klein-Gordon's dispersion which gives decay of the electric field precisely at rate of order $t^{-3/2}$. Up to date, all the works in the mathematical literature on nonlinear Landau damping fall into the phase mixing regime, in which plasma oscillations were absent. The present work resolves the problem in the plasma oscillation regime. Our nonlinear analysis includes (1) establishing the existence and dispersion of Langmuir's waves, (2) decoupling oscillations from phase mixing in different time regimes, (3) detailing the oscillatory structure of particle trajectories in the phase space, (4) treating plasma echoes via a detailed analysis of particle-particle, particle-wave, and wave-wave interaction, and (5) designing a nonlinear iterative scheme in the physical space that captures both phase mixing and dispersion in low norms and allows growth in time in high norms. As a result, we establish nonlinear plasma oscillations and Landau damping below survival threshold for data with finite Sobolev regularity.