Creating Non-Maxwellian Velocity Distributions in Ultracold Plasmas

Abstract

We present techniques to perturb, measure and model the ion velocity distribution in an ultracold neutral plasma produced by photoionization of strontium atoms. By optical pumping with circularly polarized light we promote ions with certain velocities to a different spin ground state, and probe the resulting perturbed velocity distribution through laser-induced fluorescence spectroscopy. We discuss various approaches to extract the velocity distribution from our measured spectra, and assess their quality through comparisons with molecular dynamic simulations

13 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Creation of an Ultracold Neutral Plasma
• Coulomb crystallization in expanding laser-cooled neutral plasmas
• Evolution from a molecular Rydberg gas to an ultracold plasma in a seeded supersonic expansion of NO
• Using Three-Body Recombination to Extract Electron Temperatures of Ultracold Plasmas
• Photoassociative spectroscopy at long range in ultracold strontium
• Relaxation to non-equilibrium in expanding ultracold neutral plasmas
• Rydberg atom formation in strongly correlated ultracold plasmas
• The very slow expansion of an ultracold plasma formed in a seeded supersonic molecular beam of NO
• Energy absorption of quasineutral plasmas through electronic edge-modes

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Velocity Relaxation in a Strongly Coupled Plasma
• Experimental measurement of non-Markovian dynamics and self-diffusion in a strongly coupled plasma
• Non-diagonalizable and non-divergent susceptibility tensor in the Hamiltonian mean-field model with asymmetric momentum distributions