ABSTRACT
Analysis of the motion of charge carriers in a gaseous medium is fundamental to a proper understanding of the various manifestations of the discharge phenomena, ranging from low electron density electrical coronas to very high density fusion plasmas. It is nearly 150 years ago (1860) that James Clerk Maxwell showed that the velocities of all particles in a gas are not the same. He derived a distribution of velocities and, from the distribution, derived a number of properties of the collection of the molecules as a single entity. The Maxwell distribution served as a cornerstone for developing the theory of energy distribution of electrons in a gas, the number density of electrons being much smaller than that of molecules. We simply state the Maxwell distribution for molecular velocity, noting that a reference to a book on the kinetic theory of gases supplies the proof.
