Electron Temperature of Ultracold Plasmas

Electron temperature of ultracold plasmas.

We study the evolution of ultracold plasmas by measuring the electron temperature. Shortly after plasma formation, competition between heating and cooling mechanisms drives the electron temperature to a value within a narrow range regardless of the initial energy imparted to the electrons. In agreement with theory predictions, plasmas exhibit values of the Coulomb coupling parameter Gamma less ...

Electron-temperature evolution in expanding ultracold neutral plasmas.

We have used the free expansion of ultracold neutral plasmas as a time-resolved probe of electron temperature. A combination of experimental measurements of the ion expansion velocity and numerical simulations characterize the crossover from an elastic-collision regime at low initial Gamma(e), which is dominated by adiabatic cooling of the electrons, to the regime of high Gamma(e) in which inel...

"Ultracold" neutral plasmas at room temperature.

We report a measurement of the electron temperature in a plasma generated by a high-intensity laser focused into a jet of neon. The 15 eV electron temperature is determined using an analytic solution of the plasma equations assuming local thermodynamic equilibrium, initially developed for ultracold neutral plasmas. We show that this analysis method accurately reproduces more sophisticated plasm...

Evolution of Temperature in the Ultracold Strongly-Correlated Plasmas

We present a theoretical interpretation of the recently revealed features of temperature evolution in the ultracold plasma clouds released from a magneto-optical trap, namely: (a) its independence at the sufficiently large times on the initial plasma parameters and (b) the asymptotics close to t−1 instead of t−2, expected for a rarefied ideal gas. It is shown that both these properties can be w...

Low-temperature atom formation in ultracold neutral plasmas