Damping rate of plasmons and photons in a degenerate nonrelativistic plasma

Abstract

A calculation is presented of the plasmon and photon damping rates in a dense nonrelativistic plasma at zero temperature, following the resummation program of Braaten-Pisarski. At small soft momentum $k$, the damping is dominated by $3\to 2$ scattering processes corresponding to double longitudinal Landau damping. The dampings are proportional to $(\alpha /v_F{)}^{3/2}{k}^2/m$, where $v_F$ is the Fermi velocity.

Comments: 9 pages, 2 figures