  Plasmas in which there is a threshold for a dominant reaction to take place
(such as recombination or attachment) will have particle distributions that
evolve as the reaction progresses. The form of the Boltzmann collision term in
such a context will cause the distribution to drift from its initial form, and
so cause for example temperature fluctuations in the plasma if the distribution
is originally Maxwellian. This behaviour will impact on the relevant reaction
rates in a feedback loop that is missing from simple chemical kinetic
descriptions since the plasma cannot be considered to be isothermal, as is the
case in the latter approach. In this article we present a simple kinetic model
that captures these essential features, showing how cumulative differences in
the instantaneous species levels can arise over the purely chemical kinetic
description, with implications for process yields and efficiencies.
