This book is an introductory account of instabilities in plasma. It concentrates on laboratory plasmas, such as those encountered in fusion research, and the space plasmas studied in physics of the magnetosphere and solar atmosphere. This account bridges the gap between a graduate textbook on plasma physics and specialist monographs. An important feature is the stress placed on the similarities between astrophysical and laboratory plasmas, which are traditionally regarded as quite separate. The natural way in which the author unifies the treatment gives a wider perspective to the subject. Professor Melrose is an expert in plasma astrophysics, and has already written a two-volume book on that topic.

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This is an advanced text on electromagnetic theory, presenting a systematic discussion of electromagnetic waves and radiation processes in a wide variety of media. The treatment, taken from the field of plasma physics, is based on the dielectric tensor, and this permits the discussion of media outside the scope of the usual approach adopted in most textbooks on electromagnetism. The approach taken also has notable advantages when applied to the conventional emission processes of electromagnetic theory. The authors have thus unified the approaches used in plasma physics and astrophysics on the one hand, and in optics on the other. The book has been written clearly and pedagogically, and will be therefore of value to senior undergraduates, graduate students, lecturers and researchers. Students will find the exercises provided at the end of each chapter particularly useful.

A time-dependent model for pair creation in a pulsar magnetosphere is developed in which the parallel electric field oscillates with large amplitude. Electrons and positrons are accelerated periodically, and the amplitude of the oscillations is assumed to be large enough to cause creation of upgoing and downgoing pairs at different phases of the oscillation. With a charge-starved initial condition, we find that the oscillations result in bursts of pair creation in which the pair density rises exponentially with time. The pair density saturates at N AE ' E 2 0 /(8 m e c 2 À thr ), where E 0 is the parallel electric field in the charge-starved initial state and À thr is the Lorentz factor for effective pair creation. The frequency of oscillations following the pair creation burst is given roughly by ! osc ¼ eE 0 /(8m e cÀ thr ). A positive feedback keeps the system stable, such that the average pair creation rate balances the loss rate due to pairs escaping the magnetosphere.