Summary:
We give simple but accurate numerical fits to various two-body rates in relativistic thermal plasmas, in the temperature range kT e ~ 50 keV--1 MeV. The processes we discuss are bremsstrahlung, Coulomb heating and electron-positron pair production and annihilation. In particular we present a fit to the thermal electron-electron bremsstrahlung spectrum which is accurate to better than 5 per cent. We also include the results of some other workers, for completeness. Our results are suitable for semi-analytic or computer modelling of hot plasmas.
full paper : scanned PDF 629K : OCR PDF 117K
@journal(SS-MNRAS-204, author = "Susan Stepney and Paul W. Guilbert", title = "Numerical fits to important rates in high temperature astrophysical plasmas", journal = "Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society", volume = 204, pages = "1269--1277", year = 1983 )