Computational and theoretical analysis of electron plasma cooling by resonant interaction with a microwave cavity

Abstract

Recent experiments demonstrated that the cyclotron cooling rate of an electron plasma in a Penning–Malmberg trap can be increased by placing the plasma in a cavity and adjusting the magnetic field to make the cyclotron motion resonant with a cavity mode. Here this physics is studied with a coupled oscillator model and analyzed both analytically and numerically. Plasma cooling performance is evaluated over a wide range of system parameters, including the number of electrons, the coupling to the local electric field, the magnetic field gradient, and the detuning between the cavity and cyclotron frequencies. Scaling the equations shows that the system is well-described by a few key dimensionless quantities.