Abstract

We establish the existence and decay of plasmons, the quantum of Langmuir’s oscillatory waves found in plasma physics, for the linearized Hartree equations describing an interacting gas of infinitely many fermions near general translation-invariant steady states, including compactly supported Fermi gases at zero temperature, in the whole space ${ℝ}^d$ for $d\ge 2$. Notably, these plasmons exist precisely due to the long-range pair interaction between the particles. Next, we provide a survival threshold of spatial frequencies, below which the plasmons purely oscillate and disperse like a Klein–Gordon wave, while at the threshold they are damped by Landau damping, the classical decaying mechanism due to their resonant interaction with the background fermions. The explicit rate of Landau damping is provided for general radial homogenous equilibria. Above the threshold, the density of the excited fermions is well approximated by that of the free gas dynamics and thus decays rapidly fast for each Fourier mode via phase mixing. Finally, pointwise bounds on the Green function and dispersive estimates on the density are established.

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