ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a limited introduction to the kinetic theory of plasmas. It defines configuration space as the three-dimensional space in which the coordinates of a particle represent its position and velocity space as that in which the coordinates represent its velocity. To study the statistics of the particle motions, it is convenient to work in a six-dimensional phase space with coordinates. The first term is the kinetic energy density associated with the ordered motion of a volume element of the species; the second is the density of the work done by the ordered motion of the species relative to the mean plasma velocity; and the third is the energy density associated with the random motion of the particles relative to the species velocity. In a fully ionized plasma, the contribution to the collision term from binary collisions is not important.
