2013/04/22 by Truman Wilson, Wei‐Ting Chen, Wei-Ting Chen +1 · 13 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Adiabatic process #Atomic physics #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Dust and Plasma Wave Phenomena #Electron #Electron cooling #Electron density #Electron temperature #Evaporation #Evaporative cooler #Ion #Materials science #Nuclear physics #Physics #Plasma #Range (aeronautics) #Thermodynamics #physics.plasm-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1063/1.4813248
published in Physics of Plasmas 20(7), 073503 (American Institute of Physics) · 8 pages, 5 figures
arxiv created 2013/04/22 · openalex publication_date 2013/07/01 · arxiv updated 2015/06/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The expansion of ultracold neutral plasmas (UCP) is driven primarily by the thermal pressure of the electron component and is therefore sensitive to the electron temperature. For typical UCP spatial extents, evaporative cooling has a significant influence on the UCP expansion rate at lower densities (less than 108/cm3). We studied the effect of electron evaporation in this density range. Owing to the low density, the effects of three-body recombination were negligible. We modeled the expansion by taking into account the change in electron temperature owing to evaporation as well as adiabatic expansion and found good agreement with our data. We also developed a simple model for initial evaporation over a range of ultracold plasma densities, sizes, and electron temperatures to determine over what parameter range electron evaporation is expected to have a significant effect. We also report on a signal calibration technique, which relates the signal at our detector to the total number of ions and electrons in the ultracold plasma.