Kinetic Theory of Particles and Photons

Many laboratory and astrophysical plasmas show deviations from local ther­ modynamic equilibrium (LTE). This monograph develops non-LTE plasma spectroscopy as a kinetic theory of particles and photons, considering the radiation field as a photon gas whose distribution function (the radiation in­ tensity) obeys a kinetic equation (the radiative transfer equation), just as the distribution functions...