Dusty Plasma - Image and Movie Gallery

Dusty Plasma Image and Movie Gallery

One of the most appealing aspects of dusty plasma research is that because of the relatively large size of the dust grains (as compared to the ions and electrons in the plasma), many of the phenomena in dusty plasma are both macroscopic (visible to the naked eye) AND have slow time evolution (~ up to several tens of seconds).

This allows many dusty plasma phenomena - including features like waves and vortices - to be directly imaged. This gallery of photographs and movies highlight some of these phenomena.

Images (from collaborative experiments at NRL and MPE):

Experiments from Naval Research Laboratory (NRL)

	A rotating cloud in the DUPLEX experiment. The image is obtainedusing the Auburn PIV laser diagnostic system which was on loan to NRL during Summer, 2001.
	A "double" cloud observed in DUPLEX. Here the cloud edges were observed to be rotating in opposite directions.
	A color image of two separated dust clouds in DUPLEX.

Experiments from Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE)

	The Plasma Kristal (crytsal) Experiment (PKE) at MPE. Prof. Thomas conducted 5 weeks of studies on the PKE flight hardware using PIV and laser flashing techniques to study particle transport in rf generated dusty plasmas.
	A large void and a crystal in the PKE chamber.
	A "double void" in the PKE chamber.
	Tracks of particle motion through a void in the PKE chamber.

Image Gallery:

Image	Description	Image	Description
	A "double" dust cloud suspended below the anode in DPX. Inverted grayscale image obtained using the PIV system		Interior of the DPX experiment showing the location of the anode, dust cloud, and tray.
	A color image of a dust cloud suspended below the anode illuminated by the PIV lasers.		Photograph of the DPX device during its initial assembly in August, 1998.
	A color image of a dust cloud illuminated using a He-Ne laser. The blue glow is from the argon plasma.		Comparison of velocity vectors from central cloud (red) and dust stream (blue). The stream vectors are shown as 3/8th scale relative to the cloud vectors.
	Grayscale image sequence of the motion of a light sheet through a dust cloud to give the 3-D dust cloud structure.		Expansion of the x=0 mm image of the image sequence (from the left column) to show the presence of the dust acoustic waves.
	Photograph of the DPX vacuum vessel and PIV Lasers		Close-up photograph of the PIV laser head assembly

Movies:

Movie 1 - (4.5 MB MPEG) of dust in the DPX device

Link To:

Plasma Research

AU Physics

Auburn University