Adiabatic cooling of trapped nonneutral plasmas

TL;DR

This paper develops a kinetic theory for adiabatic cooling of trapped nonneutral plasmas, extending from one to three dimensions, and validates it with experiments on antiproton plasmas, enhancing understanding of plasma cooling techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive kinetic model for adiabatic cooling in nonneutral plasmas, applicable in multiple dimensions, and confirms its accuracy through experimental comparison.

Findings

The theory accurately predicts plasma cooling behavior.

Extension to three dimensions improves practical applicability.

Excellent agreement with recent experimental data.

Abstract

Nonneutral plasmas can be trapped for long times by means of combined electric and magnetic fields. Adiabatic cooling is achieved by slowly decreasing the trapping frequency and letting the plasma occupy a larger volume. We develop a fully kinetic time-dependent theory of adiabatic cooling for plasmas trapped in a one-dimensional well. This approach is further extended to three dimensions and applied to the cooling of antiproton plasmas, showing excellent agreement with recent experiments [G. Gabrielse et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 073002 (2011)].