ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates electromagnetic wave propagation through warm collisionless plasma. The appearance of the cyclotron harmonic resonances in warm plasma is of great practical importance in plasma physics, because it greatly increases the number of resonant frequencies at which waves can transfer energy to the plasma. The collisionless cyclotron damping mechanism is similar to the Landau damping mechanism for longitudinal waves. In view of the importance of the plasma dispersion function, and its regular appearance in the literature of plasma physics, it is convenient to briefly examine its main properties. It is not feasible to give a comprehensive account of velocity-space instabilities in magnetized plasma, on account of the great number of different instabilities of this type. Rather than trying to analyze the full electromagnetic dispersion relation, we shall concentrate on the stability of electrostatic waves.
