Parametric instabilities and anomalous absorption and heating of plasmas

instabilities will be reviewed.The general dispersion relation will be derived frcm the Vlasov equation.The dispersion relation will be analyzed in trims of the linear dielectric function and its derivatives.The thresholds and growth rates for the decay instability, the purely growing mode, and the kinetic instability will be obtained.The analysis will be applied to discuss some specific modes, such as the interaction of electron plasma waves, and the ion acoustic waves, the upper hybrid and the lower hybrid modes, Bernstein waves &nd ion acoustic waves, and the decay or the whistler wave and the lower hybrid wave.Some numerical results will be presented.8.In RF heating experiments the possibility of parametric instabilities must be recognized.The experimental evidence for the .absorption and/or heating will be survived.The experiments performed in the past few years can be divided according to gconetry as follows: (1) Excitation by grids (including probes and capacitor plates) (2) Cavity excitation (3) Microwave irradiation from waveguide: will be compared by discussing specific laboratory experiments.The evidence of anomalous absorption and heating, as being due to parametric instabilities, will be discussed.