SDR, EVC, and SDREVC: Limitations and Extensions
Abstract
Methods for reducing the radius, temperature and space charge of a non-neutral plasma are usually reported for conditions which approximate an ideal Penning Malmberg trap. Here, we show that (i) similar methods are still effective under surprisingly adverse circumstances: we perform strong drive regime (SDR) compression and SDREVC in a strong magnetic mirror field using only 3 out of 4 rotating wall petals. In addition, we demonstrate (ii) an alternative to SDREVC, using e-kick instead of evaporative cooling (EVC) and (iii) an upper limit for how much plasma can be cooled to $T<20 \mathrm {K}$ using EVC. This limit depends on the space charge, not on the number of particles or the plasma density.
- Publication:
-
Journal of Plasma Physics
- Pub Date:
- October 2023
- DOI:
- 10.1017/S0022377823001022
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2306.00862
- Bibcode:
- 2023JPlPh..89e9501H
- Keywords:
-
- plasma properties;
- Physics - Plasma Physics
- E-Print:
- Version 2: a small discrepancy between the N values for Table 1 and Fig. 3 led to an investigation of the charge counting diagnostic. There is a small energy dependence which only became apparent following improvements to pre-SDREVC. The pulsed dump was modified to reduce this dependence. The data for Table 1 and Fig. 3 was taken again with the improved methods