Ultracold neutral plasmas.

High Resolution Sculpting and Imaging of Ultracold Neutral Plasmas

High Resolution Sculpting and Imaging of Ultracold Neutral Plasmas

"Ultracold" neutral plasmas at room temperature.

We report a measurement of the electron temperature in a plasma generated by a high-intensity laser focused into a jet of neon. The 15 eV electron temperature is determined using an analytic solution of the plasma equations assuming local thermodynamic equilibrium, initially developed for ultracold neutral plasmas. We show that this analysis method accurately reproduces more sophisticated plasm...

Electron-temperature evolution in expanding ultracold neutral plasmas.

We have used the free expansion of ultracold neutral plasmas as a time-resolved probe of electron temperature. A combination of experimental measurements of the ion expansion velocity and numerical simulations characterize the crossover from an elastic-collision regime at low initial Gamma(e), which is dominated by adiabatic cooling of the electrons, to the regime of high Gamma(e) in which inel...

Measurement and simulation of laser-induced fluorescence from nonequilibrium ultracold neutral plasmas

We report measurements and simulations of laser-induced fluorescence in ultracold neutral plasmas. We focus on the earliest times, when the plasma equilibrium is evolving and before the plasma expands. In the simulation, the ions interact via the Yukawa potential in a small cell with wrapped boundary conditions. We solve the optical Bloch equation for each ion in the simulation as a function of...

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...

Low-temperature atom formation in ultracold neutral plasmas