Description of longitudinal space charge effects in beams and plasma through dielectric permittivity*

We develop a universal framework which allows quickly solve a wide class of problems for longitudinal space charge effects in beams and plasmas in cylindrical geometry. We introduce the longitudinal dielectric permittivity for the beam of charged particles, which describes its collective space charge response. The analysis yields an effective plasma frequency, which depends on the transverse geometry of the system. This dielectric permittivity mirrors the dielectric permittivity of plasma and matches the one dimensional (1D) expression once the transverse size of the beam is large. Several particle species can be included as additive terms describing susceptibility of each specie. The developed approach allows to study stability criteria for collective beam-beam and beam-plasma instabilities for arbitrary transverse distributions in particle densities.