Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userInfluence of electron-ion collisions on Coulomb crystallization of ultracold neutral plasmas
272
0
0.0
(
0
)
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
While ion heating by elastic electron-ion collisions may be neglected for a description of the evolution of freely expanding ultracold neutral plasmas, the situation is different in scenarios where the ions are laser-cooled during the system evolution. We show that electron-ion collisions in laser-cooled plasmas influence the ionic temperature, decreasing the degree of correlation obtainable in such systems. However, taking into account the collisions increases the ion temperature much less than what would be estimated based on static plasma clouds neglecting the plasma expansion. The latter leads to both adiabatic cooling of the ions as well as, more importantly, a rapid decrease of the collisional heating rate.
rate research
Read More
We present long-time simulations of expanding ultracold neutral plasmas, including a full treatment of the strongly coupled ion dynamics. Thereby, the relaxation dynamics of the expanding laser-cooled plasma is studied, taking into account elastic as well as inelastic collisions. It is demonstrated that, depending on the initial conditions, the ionic component of the plasma may exhibit short-range order or even a superimposed long-range order resulting in concentric ion shells. In contrast to ionic plasmas confined in traps, the shell structures are built up from the center of the plasma cloud rather than from the periphery.
We photoionize laser-cooled atoms with a laser beam possessing spatially periodic intensity modulations to create ultracold neutral plasmas with controlled density perturbations. Laser-induced fluorescence imaging reveals that the density perturbations oscillate in space and time, and the dispersion relation of the oscillations matches that of ion acoustic waves, which are long-wavelength, electrostatic, density waves.
Ultracold plasmas (UCP) provide a well-controlled system for studying multiple aspects in plasma physics that include collisions and strong coupling effects. By applying a short electric field pulse to a UCP, a plasma electron center-of-mass (CM) oscillation can be initiated. In accessible parameter ranges, the damping rate of this oscillation is determined by the electron-ion collision rate. We performed measurements of the oscillation damping rate with such parameters and compared the measured rates to both a molecular dynamic (MD) simulation that includes strong coupling effects and to Monte-Carlo collisional operator simulation designed to predict the damping rate including only weak coupling considerations. We found agreement between experimentally measured damping rate and the MD result. This agreement did require including the influence of a previously unreported UCP heating mechanism whereby the presence of a DC electric field during ionization increased the electron temperature, but estimations and simulations indicate that such a heating mechanism should be present for our parameters. The measured damping rate at our coldest electron temperature conditions was much faster than the weak coupling prediction obtained from the Monte-Carlo operator simulation, which indicates the presence of significant strong coupling influence. The density averaged electron strong coupling parameter $Gamma$ measured at our coldest electron temperature conditions was 0.35.
We describe a hybrid molecular dynamics approach for the description of ultracold neutral plasmas, based on an adiabatic treatment of the electron gas and a full molecular dynamics simulation of the ions, which allows us to follow the long-time evolution of the plasma including the effect of the strongly coupled ion motion. The plasma shows a rather complex relaxation behavior, connected with temporal as well as spatial oscillations of the ion temperature. Furthermore, additional laser cooling of the ions during the plasma evolution drastically modifies the expansion dynamics, so that crystallization of the ion component can occur in this nonequilibrium system, leading to lattice-like structures or even long-range order resulting in concentric shells.
We investigate the strongly correlated ion dynamics and the degree of coupling achievable in the evolution of freely expanding ultracold neutral plasmas. We demonstrate that the ionic Coulomb coupling parameter $Gamma_{rm i}$ increases considerably in later stages of the expansion, reaching the strongly coupled regime despite the well-known initial drop of $Gamma_{rm i}$ to order unity due to disorder-induced heating. Furthermore, we formulate a suitable measure of correlation and show th at $Gamma_{rm i}$ calculated from the ionic temperature and density reflects the degree of order in the system if it is sufficiently close to a quasisteady state. At later times, however, the expansion of the plasma cloud becomes faster than the relaxation of correlations, and the system does not reach thermodynamic equilibrium anymore.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
