Confinement of electron plasma by levitating dipole magnet
- Department of Advanced Energy, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, University of Tokyo, 5-1-5 Kashiwanoha, Kashiwa, Chiba 277-8561 (Japan)
A recent experiment on the Ring Trap 1 device has demonstrated long-term (exceeding 300 s) confinement of non-neutral (pure electron) plasma in a dipole magnetic field; particles diffuse inward, steepening the density gradient and self-organizing into a stable vortex structure [Z. Yoshida et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 235004 (2010)]. In this study, the internal structures of the plasma are experimentally investigated, and it is shown that the observations are consistent with rigidly rotating charged particle clump. The radial profiles of electrostatic potential and electron density consistently show that the drift velocity has homogeneous angular frequency in the confinement region. The electrostatic fluctuations also rotate rigidly with a phase velocity that agrees with the drift velocity. The magnetospheric system should have a wide application in confining single-species and even multiple-species charged particles.
- OSTI ID:
- 21531948
- Journal Information:
- Physics of Plasmas, Vol. 17, Issue 11; Other Information: DOI: 10.1063/1.3514207; (c) 2010 American Institute of Physics; ISSN 1070-664X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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