Confinement and self-organization of filamentary structures in magnetized plasmas (MDPX)

The Magnetized Dusty Plasma eXperiment (MDPX) is a unique device capable of generating steady-state magnetic fields up to 3.5 T, enabling the study of low-temperature plasmas in strongly magnetized regimes. Above 1 T, filamentary structures emerge spontaneously in radio-frequency plasmas, forming coherent, field-aligned features that disrupt uniformity in dusty plasma experiments. This work presents a systematic experimental study of filament self-organization, focusing on how spatial structure and dynamics depend on neutral gas pressure and magnetic field strength—that is, the degree of ion magnetization. Using a machine learning-based tracking framework, we extract filament trajectories and analyze key physical metrics including velocity, angular speed, radial confinement, and pairwise correlations. While results remain consistent with previous studies of unconfined filaments—lower pressures (higher magnetization) lead to increased turbulence, fragmentation, and morphological variability—this study finds that, under confinement, higher pressures (lower magnetization) promote more coherent, quasi-equilibrium ring-like configurations. This presentation will compare and contrast how these two observations scale with magnetic field and present initial ideas on creating a unified physical framework that describes both of these processes.