Breathing mode of dust cloud in a cogenerated dusty plasma

Abstract

Recently, different types of collective processes in dusty plasmas have become prime interest amongst plasma physicists. Dust particles are present in every variety of plasmas and play a vital role in plasma crystals, semiconductor material processing, low-temperature physics, nanomaterials etc. Keeping these in mind, we have done an experiment on a cogenerated unmagnetized dusty plasma in a stainless-steel chamber between two parallel electrodes with one electrode (anode) is grounded while the other is, a graphite cathode, connected with a bipolar pulsed dc power supply. It is experimentally observed that in cogenerated unmagnetized dusty plasma the carbon dust cloud is fluctuating as a breathing mode like a heart beat mode observed in dust void, both magnetized and unmagnetized plasma. The theoretical model suggests that, in cylindrical geometry, the Bessel's differential equation gives a clear cut picture for the condition of occurrence of dust rotation (m ≠ 0) or the dust breathing mode (at m = 0, where m is the order of Bessel function). Our experiment clearly shows that the whole dust cloud is fluctuating in an unmagnetized plasma not only the void fluctuation.