Structural Alignment Within Neighboring Layers in Microgravity Dusty Plasma

Throughout energy transfer on the PK-4 dusty plasma system, the transient states in a dynamic system exhibit micro-structural behaviors.

The system of interest is microgravity dusty plasma, or a collection of ions, electrons, neutral atoms and highly charged macroscopic particles, called “dust”. The data analyzed is from the Plasmakristall-4 experiment on board the International Space Station.

Previous studies of PK-4 experiments have shown that the dust particles in these clouds can exhibit structural alignment, layering, and nested surfaces, similar to that of liquid crystals[1]. By using an FOV and frame rate, these data sets are studied thoroughly and have comprehensive analysis of the data.

These structures mentioned can be analyzed through “bond order” parameters, an analysis of angles between particles and sorting them into respective categories. These parameters are related to the central plane and successive planes of the 3D cloud. The data is analyzed using code in MATLAB and ImageJ Mosaic Particle Tracking [2], to configure the best settings to analyze the data. These studies help applications with solid-state physics and energy transfer in hybrid quantum systems, and to determine flow and behavior of dusty plasma particles in relationship with one another.