A COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS OF PROPAGATION OF LOCALIZED WAVES IN COLLISIONLESS PLASMA MEDIA

A study of the propagation of localized waves in collisionless plasma media is undertaken. It is shown how such pulsed wavefields can be gen erated from finite-time dynamic apertures. We demonstrate that localiz ed waves exhibit an unusual robustness when they propagate in a plasma medium modeled by the Klein-Gordon equation. The decay rates of the c entroids of such pulses are comparable to those of localized waves tra veling in vacuum. Furthermore, when a parameter controlling the spatio -temporal coupling of the spectral components of the localized wave is tuned to the plasma frequency, the decay of the centroid of the radia ted field becomes slower than that of a localized wave traveling in va cuum. We provide an explanation of this behavior based on the unusual depletion of the spectral components of the finite-time localized wave s.