Dusty Plasma Correlation Function Experiment

Abstract

Dust particles immersed within a plasma environment, such as those in protostellar clouds, planetary rings or cometary environments, will acquire an electric charge. If the ratio of the inter-particle potential energy to the average kinetic energy is high enough the particles will form either a "liquid" structure with short-range ordering or a crystalline structure with long range ordering. Many experiments have been conducted over the past several years on such colloidal plasmas to discover the nature of the crystals formed, but more work is needed to fully understand these complex colloidal systems. Most previous experiments have employed monodisperse spheres to form Coulomb crystals. However, in nature (as well as in most plasma processing environments) the distribution of particle sizes is more randomized and disperse. This paper reports experiments which were carried out in a GEC rf reference cell modified for use as a dusty plasma system, using varying sizes of particles to determine the manner in which the correlation function depends upon the overall dust grain size distribution. (The correlation function determines the overall crystalline structure of the lattice.) Two dimensional plasma crystals were formed of assorted glass spheres with specific size distributions in an argon plasma. Using various optical techniques, the pair correlation function was determined and compared to those calculated numerically.

6 pages, Presented at COSPAR '03

References in corpus (4)

• Digital Imaging and Analysis of Dusty Plasmas
• Dispersion Relations for Thermally Excited Waves in Plasma Crystals
• Numerical Simulations and Analysis of Thermally Excited Waves in Plasma Crystals
• Finite Coulomb Crystal Formation

Cited by in corpus (9)

• One-dimensional vertical dust strings in a glass box
• Phase Transitions in a Dusty Plasma with Two Distinct Particle Sizes
• Digital Imaging and Analysis of Dusty Plasmas
• A Simple Method to Measure the Interaction Potential of Dielectric Grains in a Dusty Plasma
• Relationship between the DC Bias and Debye Length in a Complex Plasma
• Measurement of the vertical non-uniformity of the plasma sheath in a complex plasma
• Perspective: The dusty plasma experiments a learning tool for physics graduate students
• Finite Coulomb Crystal Formation
• Using dust particle vertical chains for wakefield investigation