Arrest of wave collapse and transitional damping

It is shown that damping of a 3-D Langmuir caviton can be due to both Landau damping and the damping due to inhomogenieties in the fields and particle distribution function. The latter the authors call transitional damping. It is found that the damping of the waves in the cavity, considered as a whole structure, differs essentially from the damping obtained by considering only the field at the centre. Arrest of the collapse seems to be very sensitive to inhomogeneities in the field structure and particle distribution function.