When can I assume that plasma is collisionless? How is the presumption of a plasma being "collisionless" depend on other parameters such as ion density and ion and electron temperature?
1 Answers
This is problem dependent, and boils down to the question whether collisions have an important effect on the answer or not. For plasma to be considered collisionless, one condition is $\lambda \gg L$ where $\lambda$ is the collisional mean-free path of plasma particles, and $L$ is the spatial scale of interest (typically the spatial scale of plasma parameters such as density or pressure). If plasma is nearly uniform, and all gradient lengths are very large then a more useful criterion is $\nu \ll 1/\tau$ where $\nu$ is the collision frequency and $\tau$ is the temporal scale of interest. An intuitive way to understand this is to imagine a full differential equation governing the time evolution of plasma (say, the Fokker-Planck kinetic equation); it includes time derivatives of the distribution function $\partial{}_{t} f$ and collisional terms that scale as $\nu f$ (just because of dimensionality), so the collisional terms can be dropped when $\nu$ is much smaller than $1/\tau$.

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An easy example is a collisionless shock in the solar wind, where the shock ramp thickness tends to be between the electron and ion inertial lengths (e.g., ~1-150 km near Earth) while the collisional mean free path can exceed 1 AU ~ $10^{8}$ km. – honeste_vivere Aug 11 '19 at 19:30