Langmuir Wave Phase Velocity in Unneutralized Beams

We investigate the dispersion relation for long wavelength slow Langmuir waves in a relativistic particle beam propagating along a strong magnetic guide field in an evacuated metallic waveguide. For a large class of beam radial profiles, wave phase velocity drops to zero with infinite slope as beam current approaches the space-charge limit. This result is of importance to certain collective ion acceleration proposals.