Observations of thermal creep gas flow and dust-density waves in dusty plasma experiments

In laboratory experiments, I study strongly-coupled dusty plasma levitated in a glow-discharge plasma. Dusty plasma is an arrangement of small dust particles in a plasma background of electrons, ions, and neutral gas. The dust particles are negatively charged because they collect electrons and ions from the background plasma. Depending on the experimental setup, the plasma’s electric field can help to balance the dust particles against gravity. The high dust charge causes dust particles to repel each other, while confinement forces prevent their escape. The dust particles cannot easily move past one another, and instead organize themselves into highlyordered structures. The neutral gas also plays a key role in these experiments. Depending on the relative motion between gas and dust particles, the neutral gas can either impede dust motion or it can drive the dust into motion. In this thesis, I report the findings of three separate experiments. In the first experiment, I use a spherically-shaped dusty plasma (Yukawa ball) as an indicator of a flow of neutral gas, called thermal creep flow. In the second and third experiments, I study naturally occurring dust-density waves, which propagate within the volume of a dusty plasma that has many horizontal layers. In Ch. 2 of this thesis, I study thermal creep flow (TCF), which is a flow of gas driven by a temperature gradient along a solid boundary. Stripes on a glass box are heated by laser beam absorption, leading to both TCF and a thermophoretic force. A stirring motion of the dust particle suspension is observed. By eliminating all other explanations for this motion, I conclude that TCF at the boundary couples by drag to the bulk gas, causing the bulk gas to flow, thereby stirring the suspension of dust particles. This result provides an experimental verification that TCF in the slip-flow regime causes steady-state gas flow in a confined volume.