2009/05/10 by Yurii V. Dumin, Dumin, Yurii V.
Physics and Astronomy · #Computational Physics (physics.comp-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Plasma Physics (physics.plasm-ph) #physics.comp-ph #physics.plasm-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0905.1485
LaTeX, 7 pages, 1 eps figure
arxiv created 2009/05/10 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
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 well explained by the model of virialization of the charged particle velocities in the regime of strong electron-ion correlations, while heating due to inelastic processes (e.g. three-body recombination) should be of secondary importance. These conclusions are confirmed also by the results of ab initio computer simulations.