Covariant Constitutive Relations, Landau Damping and Non-stationary Inhomogeneous Plasmas

Models of covariant linear electromagnetic constitutive relations are formulated that have wide applicability to the computation of susceptibility tensors for dispersive and inhomogeneous media. A perturbative framework is used to derive a linear constitutive relation for a globally neutral plasma enabling one to describe in this context a generalized Landau damping mechanism for non-stationary inhomogeneous plasma states.