COLLISIONAL AVALANCHE EXPONENTIATION OF RUNAWAY ELECTRONS IN ELECTRIFIED PLASMAS

In contrast to earlier expectations, it is estimated that generation of runaway electrons from close collisions of existing runaways with cold plasma electrons can be significant even for small electric fields, whenever runaways can gain energies of about 20 MeV or more. In that case, the runaway population will grow exponentially with the energy spectrum showing an exponential decrease towards higher energies. Energy gains of the required magnitude may occur in large tokamak devices as well as in cosmic-ray generation.