Creating and studying ion acoustic waves in ultracold neutral plasmas

Modulational instability of dust ion acoustic waves in astrophysical dusty plasmas with non thermal electrons

  Propagation of dust ion acoustic waves in plasmas composed of nonthermal distributed electrons and stationary dust particles is investigated. Nonlinear Schrdinger equation is derived to describe small amplitude waves, using the reduction perturbation technique. Modulation instability of dust ion acoustic waves is analysed for this system. Parametric investigation indicates that growth rate of...

Ultracold neutral plasmas.

Ultracold neutral plasmas occupy an exotic regime of plasma physics in which electrons form a swarming, neutralizing background for ions that sluggishly move in a correlated manner. Strong interactions between the charged particles give rise to surprising dynamics such as oscillations of the average kinetic energy during equilibration and extremely fast recombination. Such phenomena offer stimu...

Evolution of ultracold neutral plasmas.

We present the first large-scale simulations of an ultracold neutral plasma, produced by photoionization of laser-cooled xenon atoms, from creation to initial expansion, using classical molecular-dynamics methods with open boundary conditions. We reproduce many of the experimental findings such as the trapping efficiency of electrons with increased ion number, a minimum electron temperature ach...

Ion acoustic waves and double-layers in electronegative expanding plasmas

Recombination fluorescence in ultracold neutral plasmas.

We present the first measurements and simulations of recombination fluorescence from ultracold neutral calcium plasmas. This method probes three-body recombination at times less than 1 micros, shorter than previously published time scales. For the lowest initial electron temperatures, the recombination rate scales with the density as n0(2.2), significantly slower than the predicted n0(3). Recom...