Anomalous Diffusion in Dusty Plasma in External Electric Field

Using the Plasmakristall-4 (Pk-4) system onboard the International Space Station (ISS), microgravity dusty plasmas can be suspended and recorded using a video camera to capture the anomalous behavior of dust particle diffusions. Anomalous behaviors are a fundamental characteristic that affects biological and inorganic matter. Dusty plasmas are an effective device to study anomalous behavior due to their size, trackable speeds, and ability to be manipulated for specific observations. Properties of anomalous and anisotropic behaviors have been analyzed before using the PK4 system; however, this experimental analysis builds upon this work by utilizing improved temporal resolution with the FOV and an increased camera frame rate for a more visible and smoother video. Using two types of anomalous diffusions: (I) nonlinear growth of the mean squared displacement with time, and (II) non-Gaussian distribution functions of the dust particle displacements. These will explore the varying speeds, characteristics, and patterns of dust motion in correspondence with how the surrounding electromagnetic fields affect the dust particles. We will produce MSD plots and displacement histograms from the dust particle trajectory video data collected from the ISS PK-4 machine. The fitting techniques will extract data from the MSD plots and the q-exponent from the displacement histograms for all examined cases to produce the resulting constructive data.

[1] https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2411.15705