ABSTRACT
With increased use of intense short-pulsed lasers or high-frequency electromagnetic waves (EWs) for basic and applied plasma research, an understanding of the predischarge electron dynamics has become crucial, and for this a knowledge of the dependence of N over Λ/λ in the presence of the high-frequency EWs and magnetostatic (B) fields (in case of magnetically assisted discharges) is required, where N is the number of collisions suffered by an electron in diffusing out of the container, λ is the mean-free path, and Λ is the characteristic diffusion length. This is essentially a problem where the classical field-free random walk needs to be evaluated in the presence of constraints imposed on the electron motion by the EW and B fields. We show that there is an intricate connection of the physics of this problem to the problem of finding out the plasma initiation time (breakdown time) and critical threshold electric fields [1-8].
