Nonthermal and screening effects on the inelastic Compton scattering in Lorentzian plasmas

Abstract

The nonthermal and screening effects on the inelastic Compton scattering process are investigated in Lorentzian plasmas. The screened atomic wave functions and energies for the hydrogenic ion in Lorentzian plasmas are obtained by the Rayleigh-Ritz variational method. The transition matrix element for the inelastic Compton scattering process in Lorentzian plasmas is also obtained as a function of the spectral index and plasma parameters by the two photon-perturbation Hamiltonian. It is found that the nonthermal character of the Lorentzian plasma suppresses the inelastic Compton scattering cross section. In addition, the nonthermal effects are found to be significant for 2 < kappa < 5, where kappa is the spectral index of the Lorentzian plasma. (C) 2009 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3229941]