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Abstract:
For the benefit of a broader audience, I will first review the formulation of
kinetic MHD (Kulsrud, Handbook of Plasma Physics, 1983), which results from
expansion of the collisionless Vlasov-Boltzmann kinetic equation in the limit of
slow dynamics compared to fast particle gyration in the magnetic field. This is
in some sense the first step beyond MHD to include kinetic particle effects in
the long mean-free-path limit. I will compare these equations with gyrokinetic
and full kinetic equations and discuss the implications of various orderings. I
will next discuss Landau-fluid approximations to kinetic MHD (Snyder, Hammett,
Dorland, Phys. Plasmas 1997). An n-pole Pade approximation to the linearized
closure problem is employed, which leads to a non-local heat-conduction
expression that differs from some earlier semi-empirical formulas. Some of the
relative advantages and disadvantages of Landau-fluid and fully kinetic
solutions will be discussed.
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