Transition to ion magnetization as a threshold for plasma and dusty plasma structure formation in the Magnetized Dusty Plasma Experiment (MDPX) device

The Magnetized Dusty Plasma Experiment (MDPX) device investigates capacitively coupled, rf-generated, low temperature plasma and dusty plasma configurations for magnetic fields, B > 1 Tesla. The wide variety of phenomena observed in the MDPX experiments include melting of plasma crystals in strong magnetic fields, the formation of imposed, ordered dust structures, and the formation of field-aligned plasma filamentary structures. In all these cases, the transition in the behavior of both the background plasma and the dusty plasma is observed as the ions become magnetized. Here, "ion magnetization" is defined as the condition where ions can complete one or more gyro-orbits without undergoing a collision with a neutral atom. It remains unclear how this change in the ion dynamics, which occurs at microscopic spatial scales (~10's of micrometers) influences the self-organization of the macroscopic structures (~mm to cm) that are seen in the experiments. This presentation will discuss evidence of the ion magnetization threshold for the various phenomena described above and present preliminary numerical studies that seek to gain insights into the connection between the microscale dynamics and macroscopic observations.