Relativistic fluid model treatment of charged particle beams

A relativistic fluid model is developed to study the dynamic evolution and stability of the charged particle beam in a beam-generated air plasma. Starting with the relativistic Vlasov equation, a consistent set of moment equations are generated and closed by dropping third and higher order correlations in the random four-velocity. A simplified beam-fluid model is produced by assuming that the beam is mono-energetic and by employing the paraxial assumption. The FLUSH code incorporates this fluid description into an axisymmetric algorithm for propagation in air.