Mudi Chen

Ion-wake field inside a glass box

The confinement provided by a glass box is proving ideal for the formation of vertically aligned structures and a convenient method for controlling the number of dust particles comprising these dust structures as well as their sizes and shapes. In this paper, the electronic confinement of the glass box is mapped, and the particle interactions between the particle pairs inside the glass box are measured. The ion-wake field is shown to exist within the glass box, and its vertical and horizontal extents are measured.

Mapping of force fields in a capacitively driven radiofrequency plasma discharge

In this paper a method is described that allows mapping of the forces acting on dust particles in a GEC reference cell. Monodisperse particles are dropped into the plasma environment and their trajectories are tracked using a high-speed camera system to determine local accelerations and respective forces. Collecting data from a large number of particle drops allows the identification of three-dimensional vector fields for the acting forces. The procedure is described and multiple examples in which the method has been applied are given. These examples include a simple plasma sheath, plasmas perturbed by a horizontal and vertical dipole magnet, an array of multiple magnets mimicking the fields found at a lunar swirl, and the fields inside a glass box used for particle confinement. Further applicability in other plasma environments will be discussed shortly.