Trapped-particle-mediated collisional damping of nonaxisymmetric plasma waves.

Weak axial variations in magnetic or electric confinement fields in pure electron plasmas cause slow electrons to be trapped locally, and collisional diffusion across the trapping separatrix then causes surprisingly large trapped-particle-mediated (TPM) damping and transport effects. Here we characterize TPM damping of m theta not equal to 0, m(z) = +/-1 Trivelpiece-Gould plasma modes in large-amplitude long-lived Bernstein-Greene-Kruskal states. The TPM damping gives gammaBGK/omega approximately 10(-4) and seems to dominate in regimes of weak interparticle collisions.