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High Temperature

Low-Frequency Ion Oscillations during the Expansion of Ultracold Plasma

Sergey Ya. Bronin, Evgenii Vladimirovich Vikhrov, B. B. Zelener, B. V. Zelener

Published Oct 1, 2024• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract The results of calculations using the molecular dynamics method of low-frequency ion oscillations in ultracold plasma, previously observed in the experiment, are presented. Oscillations of the radial velocity of ions and changes in the direction of their flows during the expansion of ultracold plasma in a quadrupole magnetic field are detected. This is due to the influence of the magnetic field on the charge imbalance, which leads to the simultaneous existence of potential wells for both electrons and ions. Ion temperature oscillations with a frequency close to the ion plasma frequency are also detected. Satisfactory agreement with the experiment is obtained.

DOI
10.1134/s0018151x25700312

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•Jan 1, 2009•1 citation
Abstract The results of calculations using the molecular dynamics method of low-frequency ion oscillations in ultracold plasma, previously observed in the experiment, are presented. Oscillations of the radial velocity of ions and changes in the direction of their flows during the expansion of ultracold plasma in a quadrupole magnetic field are detected. This is due to the influence of the magnetic field on the charge imbalance, which leads to the simultaneous existence of potential wells for both electrons and ions. Ion temperature oscillations with a frequency close to the ion plasma frequency are also detected. Satisfactory agreement with the experiment is obtained.
We present simulation results of ultracold Sr plasma expansion in a quadrupole magnetic field by means of molecular dynamics. An analysis of plasma evolution influenced by a magnetic field is given. Plasma confinement time behavior under variation of magnetic field strength is estimated. Similarity of the time dependence of the concentration and distribution of ion velocities against the parameters of the plasma and magnetic field is established. Simulation results are in agreement with the experimental ones.
Ultracold plasmas are regarded as quasineutral but not strictly neutral. The results of charge imbalance in the expansion of ultracold plasmas are reported. The calculations are performed by a full molecular-dynamics simulation. The details of the electron velocity distributions are calculated without the assumption of electron global thermal equilibrium and Boltzmann distribution. Spontaneous evolutions of the charge imbalance from the initial states with perfect neutrality are given in the simulations. The expansion of outer plasma slows down with the charge imbalance. The influences of plasma size and parameters on the charge imbalance are discussed. The radial profiles of electron temperature are given for the first time, and the self-similar expansion can still occur even if there is no global thermal equilibrium. The electron disorder induced heating is also found in the simulation.
Calculations of the spectrum of eigen oscillations of an inhomogeneous ultracold plasma are presented both in the absence and in the presence of charge imbalance. The collective modes of these plasma oscillations are recorded in experiments as absorption resonances of a radio frequency electric field. It is shown that in the presence of friction of the electronic component, a discrete spectrum of plasma eigen oscillations is formed. The dependence of the frequency of these resonances on the plasma expansion time in the presence of a charge imbalance is obtained. There is good agreement with the experiments of different authors.
We report the direct molecular dynamics simulation results of the ultracold two-component plasma expansion. Interaction between charges is described by Coulomb's law. The number of particles varies from 103 to 105. It is shown in this article that the expansion of the plasma begins with the evaporation of some of the electrons and with the transfer of their kinetic energy to the energy of the electric field. After that, the field increases the kinetic energy of the ions. An important result is the detection of the supersonic ion wave formation. On the basis of the calculation results, equations and self-similar solutions are obtained. General dependences on plasma parameters are determined, which are compared with experimental data.
We present molecular dynamics simulation results for an ultracold 40^{40}40Ca plasma in a constant, homogeneous magnetic field. The magnetic field induces a significant spatial separation of charges. Furthermore, a significant fraction of the electrons escapes from the region bounded by the ions, in contrast to the case of plasma expansion into a vacuum. This leads to the formation of a quasineutral plasma core containing the remaining electrons and surrounded by an outer, thick ion shell, where the ion density drops sharply. Anisotropy in the ion kinetic energy is also observed, depending on the direction of ion motion relative to the magnetic field lines. The simulation results are in agreement with experimental data on ion dynamics.
Plasmas, often called the fourth state of matter and the most common one in the universe, have parameters varying by many orders of magnitude, from temperature of a few hundred kelvin in the Earth's ionosphere to 10 16 K in the magnetosphere of a pulsar. Ultracold plasmas, produced by photoionizing a sample of laser-cooled and trapped atoms near the ionization limit, have extended traditional neutral plasma parameters by many orders of magnitude, to electron temperatures below 1 K and ion temperatures in the tens of &mu K to a few Kelvin, and densities of 10 5 cm -3 to 10 10 cm -3 . These plasmas thus provide a testing ground to study basic plasma theory in a clean and simple system with or without a magnetic field. Previous studies of ultracold plasmas have primarily concentrated on temperature measurements, collective modes and expansion dynamics in the absence of magnetic fields. This thesis presents the first study of ultracold plasma dynamics in a magnetic field. The presence of a magnetic field during the expansion can initiate various phenomena, such as plasma confinement and plasma instabilities. While the electron temperatures are very low in ultracold plasmas, we need only tens of Gauss of magnetic field to observe significant effects on the expansion dynamics. To probe the ultraocold plasma dynamics in a magnetic field, we developed a new diagnostic - projection imaging, which images the ion distribution by extracting the ions with a high voltage pulse onto a position-sensitive detector. Early in the lifetime of the plasma (< 20 &mu s), the size of the image is dominated by the time-of-flight Coulomb explosion of the dense ion cloud. For later times, we measure the 2-D Gaussian width of the ion image, obtaining the transverse expansion velocity as a function of magnetic field (up to 70 G),and observe that the transverse expansion velocity scales as B &minus1/2 , explained by a nonlinear ambipolar diffusion model that involes anisotropic diffusion in two different directions. We also present the first observation of a plasma instability in an expanding ultracold plasma. We observe periodic emission of electrons from an ultracold plasma in weak, crossed magnetic and electric fields, and a strong perturbed electron density distribution in electron time-of-flight projection images. We identify this instability as a high-frequency electron drift instability due to the coupling between the electron drift wave and electron cyclotron harmonic, which has large wavenumbers corresponding to wavelengths close to the electron gyroradius.