Introduction

In this section we shall investigate wave propagation in a hot collisionless plasma, extending the discussion given in Sect. 4 to take thermal effects into account. It turns out that thermal modifications to wave propagation are not very well described by fluid equations. We shall, therefore, adopt a kinetic description of the plasma. The appropriate kinetic equation is, of course, the Vlasov equation, which is described in Sect. 3.1.