Helical Structures in Vertically Aligned Dust Particle Chains in a Complex Plasma

TL;DR

This study experimentally demonstrates the self-assembly of complex three-dimensional helical dust particle structures in a plasma, revealing how confinement and RF power influence their formation and stability.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental observation of various helical and multi-symmetry dust structures, confirming theoretical predictions with molecular dynamics simulations.

Findings

Structures evolve from chains to helices with increasing complexity.

Stable configurations depend on confinement, particle number, and RF power.

Transitions occur at repeatable RF power levels with no hysteresis.

Abstract

Self-assembly of structures from vertically aligned, charged dust particle bundles within a glass box placed on the lower, powered electrode of a RF GEC cell were produced and examined experimentally. Self-organized formation of one-dimensional vertical chains, two-dimensional zigzag structures and three-dimensional helical structures of triangular, quadrangular, pentagonal, hexagonal, and heptagonal symmetries are shown to occur. System evolution is shown to progress from a one-dimensional chain structure, through a zigzag transition to a two-dimensional, spindle-like structure and then to various three-dimensional, helical structures exhibiting multiple symmetries. Stable configurations are found to be dependent upon the system confinement, (where are the horizontal and vertical dust resonance frequencies), the total number of particles within a bundle and the RF power. For clusters having fixed numbers of particles, the RF power at which structural transitions occur is repeatable and exhibits no observable hysteresis. The critical conditions for these structural transitions as well as the basic symmetry exhibited by the one-, two- and three-dimensional structures that subsequently develop are in good agreement with the theoretically predicted configurations of minimum energy determined employing molecular dynamics simulations for charged dust particles confined in a prolate, spheroidal potential as presented theoretically by Kamimura and Ishihara [10].