Determination of interaction between a dust particle pair in complex plasmas

TL;DR

This study introduces a non-intrusive method to measure dust particle interactions in complex plasmas by analyzing thermal motion, revealing asymmetric Yukawa-like interactions and ion wake effects through spectral analysis.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel spectral method to quantify particle interactions and wake effects in complex plasmas without disturbing the system.

Findings

Interaction is Yukawa-like with suppressed screening length.

Vertical interaction from top to bottom is stronger than vice versa.

Horizontal attraction confirms ion wake influence.

Abstract

A non-intrusive method to measure particle interaction using only the thermal motion of the particles is applied to a vertically aligned dust particle pair in a complex plasma. The scanning mode spectra (SMS) are obtained by tracking the thermal motion of the grains, with the interaction strength then determined from the frequencies and the eigenvector configuration of the normal modes. The interaction of the bottom particle acting on the top particle is shown to be Yukawa-like with the screening length suppressed against the ion flow. The interaction of the top particle acting on the bottom particle is repulsive in the vertical direction and attractive in the horizontal direction. The vertical interaction from the top to bottom particle is stronger than that from the bottom to top particle, agreeing with an extended ion wake tail as predicted by the inhomogeneous ion wake theory. Determination of the horizontal attraction strength serves as a direct verification and quantification of the ion wake effect. Heating of the lower particle in both the vertical and horizontal directions is observed and quantitatively related to the nonreciprocity of the interaction. The in situ confinement strength at the position of the bottom particle is found to be consistently lower than at the position of the top particle, caused by decharging of the lower particle by 10-30% while inside the ion wake of the top particle.