Hermitian Moment Approach to the Classical Transport Properties of a Weakly Coupled Magnetized Plasma

A complete description of a system in equilibrium is provided by the Grand Canonical Distribution. But, systems are generally not in statistical equilibrium. We shall consider the case of an ideal gaz of charged particles. The linear theory of transport determines the 3 × 1 matrix of dissipative fluxes Jˆ_r namely, the electric current and the electronic and ionic heat fluxes, in terms of a 3 × 1 matrix of thermodynamic forces Xˆ defined by the electric field and the gradient of the densities and temperatures. The components of the 3 × 3 matrix of tensors Lˆ_rs of the linear flux-force relations define the set of transport coefficients. They are evaluated for an ion-electron magnetized plasma in the framework of the statistical mechanics of charged particles starting from the Landau kinetic equation.