Observation of an ultracold plasma instability

Abstract

We present the first observation of an instability in an expanding ultracold plasma. We observe periodic emission of electrons from an ultracold plasma in weak, crossed magnetic and electric fields, and a strongly perturbed electron density distribution in electron time-of-flight projection images. We identify this instability as a high-frequency electron drift instability due to the coupling between the electron drift wave and electron cyclotron harmonic, which has large wavenumbers corresponding to wavelengths close to the electron gyroradius.

5 pages, 4 figures, submitted to PRL

References in corpus (7)

• Creation of an Ultracold Neutral Plasma
• Plasma Oscillations and Expansion of an Ultracold Neutral Plasma
• Electron Temperature of Ultracold Plasmas
• Using Three-Body Recombination to Extract Electron Temperatures of Ultracold Plasmas
• Electron Temperature Evolution in Expanding Ultracold Neutral Plasmas
• Neutral Plasma Oscillations at Zero Temperature
• Ultracold Plasma Expansion in a Magnetic Field

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Ion Acoustic Waves in Ultracold Neutral Plasmas
• Strongly Coupled Plasmas via Rydberg-Blockade of Cold Atoms
• Rydberg atom formation in strongly correlated ultracold plasmas
• Electronic detection of collective modes of an ultracold plasma
• Density-Dependent Response of an Ultracold Plasma to Few-Cycle Radio-Frequency Pulses
• High Resolution Ionization of Ultracold Neutral Plasmas
• Ion friction at small values of the Coulomb logarithm
• Measurement and simulation of laser-induced fluorescence from non-equilibrium ultracold neutral plasmas
• Electron Evaporation from an Ultracold Plasma in a Uniform Electric Field
• Expansion of Ultracold Neutral Plasmas with Exponentially Decaying Density Distributions
• Simulations of an ultracold, neutral plasma with equal masses
• Using Charged Particle Imaging to Study Ultracold Plasma Expansion
• Magnetic Confinement of an Ultracold Neutral Plasma