Dust flow dynamics around a dust void in a strongly coupled dusty plasma medium

Dusty plasma, also known as complex plasma, comprises electrons, ions, and neutral background with additional micron or nano-sized charged components in it. The micron particles (dust) are large enough to be visualized individually using laser light scattering and hence their motion can be tracked easily by optical instruments. Depending on the Coulomb coupling strength of the dust grains, a dusty plasma can exist in gaseous, liquid as well as in crystalline phases [1-2]. Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) analysis in dusty plasma, holds the scope to study dust particle dynamics and its associated pattern formations at the particle most level. In this work, we present a detailed analysis of dust particle behavior around a dust void for two cases. Firstly, we consider the case of dusty plasma flow around a stationary dust void and secondly we study the behavior of a moving dust void in a stationary dusty plasma layer. The experiments are performed with gold-coated silica dust particles levitated in an RF discharge (~13.56 MHz and 5W power) plasma environment. The PIV analysis is performed using a MATLAB-based open-access PIV code on experimental data recorded both at 30 frames per second and100 frames per second [3]. The analysis results portraying the detailed particle behavior will be discussed.

References:

1. H. Ikezi, Phys. Fluids 29, 1764 (1986).

2. J. H. Chu and I. Lin, Phys. Rev. Lett. 72, 4009 (1994).

3. Taylor, R. Gurka, G. A. Kopp, and A. Liberzon, IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas. 59, 3262 (2010).