Creating Non-Maxwellian Velocity Distributions in Ultracold Plasmas

We present techniques to perturb, measure and model the ion velocity distribution in an ultracold neutral plasma produced by photoionization of strontium atoms. By optical pumping with circularly polarized light we promote ions with certain velocities to a different spin ground state, and probe the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2011-12
Main Authors: Castro, J, Bannasch, G, McQuillen, P, Pohl, T, Killian, T C
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Circular polarization
Computer simulation
Ion velocity
Laser induced fluorescence
Molecular dynamics
Optical pumping
Photoionization
Plasmas
Polarized light
Quality assessment
Spectrum analysis
Velocity
Velocity distribution
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Summary:We present techniques to perturb, measure and model the ion velocity distribution in an ultracold neutral plasma produced by photoionization of strontium atoms. By optical pumping with circularly polarized light we promote ions with certain velocities to a different spin ground state, and probe the resulting perturbed velocity distribution through laser-induced fluorescence spectroscopy. We discuss various approaches to extract the velocity distribution from our measured spectra, and assess their quality through comparisons with molecular dynamic simulations
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1112.3241