近期活动

CMP Seminars

Introduction to Complex Plasmas: Experiments on ground and on board the International Space Station

Cheng-Ran Du (杜诚然) Professor Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics
Fri, 2012-03-23 13:30 - 14:30
物理楼1014室

A complex plasma is a weakly ionized gas containing charged micrometer-sized particles. It has several remarkable features: Dynamical time scales associated with particles are ‘stretched’ to tens of milliseconds, yet the particles themselves can be easily visualized individually using video microscopic techniques. Furthermore, since the background gas is dilute, the particle dynamics in a strongly coupled complex plasma is virtually undamped, which provides a direct analogy to regular liquids and solids in terms of the atomistic dynamics. These features give us a unique opportunity to go beyond the limits of continuous media and study various generic processes occurring in liquids or solids at kinetic level. In the talk, I will introduce several representative experiments of complex plasmas performed either on ground or on board the International Space Station.