Temperature Moderation in Ultracold Plasmas

А. Н. Ткачев, Sergey I. Yakovlenko

Michael S. Murillo

Jose Castro, Hong Xiu Gao, T. C. Killian

Dirk O. Gericke, Michael S. Murillo

Abstract We report calculations for the disorder‐induced heating of the ions in ultracold plasmas that were created by ionization of ultracold, trapped gases. Since the ions gain a large amount of kinetic energy while building up negative potential energy, plasmas are usually heated to a moderately coupled state that is almost independent of the initial temperature. We show how this process is related to the establishment of Coulomb structure in the final plasma state. Several possibilities for reducing the heating by the introduction of structure in the initial state, i.e., the gas before ionization, are then discussed. (© 2003 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

Aleksei N Tkachev, Sergei I Yakovlenko

It is shown that the recent production [T C Killian et al. Phys. Rev. Lett . 83 4776 (1999)] of an ultracold laser plasma ( N e ~ 2 × 10 9 cm -3 , T e ~ 0.1 K, T i ~ 10 μK) can be considered as the first experimental demonstration of the metastable state of a supercooled plasma which we predicted theoretically. Our theory provides an explanation for the moderation of three-body recombination observed in the above-cited paper. We present the calculations that simulate the conditions of the ultracold-plasma experiments.

James L. Hart, Scott Bergeson, Ross L. Spencer