Electron Temperature Relaxation in the Clusterized Ultracold Plasmas

TL;DR

This study uses numerical simulations to investigate electron temperature relaxation in clusterized ultracold plasmas, revealing more violent relaxation and temperature jumps compared to uniform plasmas, and explores methods to mitigate this effect.

Contribution

It demonstrates that clusterization leads to more violent electron relaxation and proposes a two-step formation method to reduce temperature increases in ultracold plasmas.

Findings

Electron relaxation is more violent in clusterized plasmas.

Initial electron temperature jumps sharply due to virialization.

Two-step formation suppresses clusterization, leading to gentler temperature evolution.

Abstract

Ultracold plasmas are a promising candidate for the creation of strongly-coupled Coulomb systems. Unfortunately, the values of the coupling parameter Gamma_e actually achieved after photoionization of the neutral atoms remain relatively small because of the considerable intrinsic heating of the electrons. A conceivable way to get around this obstacle might be to utilize a spontaneous ionization of the ultracold Rydberg gas, where the initial kinetic energies could be much less. However, the spontaneous avalanche ionization will result in a very inhomogeneous distribution (clusterization) of the ions, which can change the efficiency of the electron relaxation in the vicinity of such clusters substantially. In the present work, this hypothesis is tested by an extensive set of numerical simulations. As a result, it is found that despite a less initial kinetic energy, the subsequent relaxation of the electron velocities in the clusterized plasmas proceeds much more violently than in the case of the statistically-uniform ionic distribution. The electron temperature, firstly, experiences a sharp initial jump (presumably, caused by the "virialization" of energies of the charged particles) and, secondly, exhibits a gradual subsequent increase (presumably, associated with a multi-particle recombination of the electrons at the ionic clusters). As a possible tool to reduce the anomalous temperature increase, we considered also a two-step plasma formation, involving the blockaded Rydberg states. This leads to a suppression of the clusterization due to a quasi-regular distribution of ions. In such a case, according to the numerical simulations, the subsequent evolution of the electron temperature proceeds more gently, approximately with the same rate as in the statistically-uniform ionic distribution.