Plasma oscillation

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Plasma oscillations, also known as Langmuir waves (eponymously after Irving Langmuir), are rapid oscillations of the electron density in conductive media, most notably plasmas as well as metals, at frequencies typically corresponding to the ultraviolet band of the electromagnetic spectrum. The oscillations can be described as an instability in the dielectric function of a free electron gas. The frequency depends only weakly on the wavelength of the oscillation. The quasiparticle resulting from the quantization of these oscillations is the plasmon. Langmuir waves were discovered by American physicists Irving Langmuir and Lewi Tonks in the 1920s. They are parallel in form to Jeans instability waves, which are caused by gravitational instabilities in a static medium.

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