Rotating Field Confinement of Pure Electron Plasmas Using Trivelpiece-Gould Modes
Abstract
A ``rotating wall'' electric field is shown to give steady-state confinement of a column of 3×109 electrons in a Penning-Malmberg trap at 4 tesla. By increasing the frequency of the rotating drive, a central-density compression by a factor of 20 has been obtained. For both dipole and quadrupole drives (i.e., mθ = 1 and 2), the compression rate depends on drive frequency, exhibiting peaks associated with kz≠0 Trivelpiece-Gould plasma modes. The drive also causes plasma heating, but cyclotron radiation cooling keeps the temperature low enough that background gas ionization is negligible.
- Publication:
-
Physical Review Letters
- Pub Date:
- November 1998
- DOI:
- 10.1103/PhysRevLett.81.4875
- Bibcode:
- 1998PhRvL..81.4875A