Enhancing particle string detection in electrorheological plasmas using asymmetrical kernel convolutional networks

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Under different plasma conditions and electric fields in a complex plasma the plasma particles organize themselves in a string-like or chain-like manner. A phase transition from string-like to an isotropic particle distribution is observed at different electrical conditions. The streaming of charged ions around plasma particles with the surrounding electric field gives the plasma its electrorheological properties. The visibility of individual particles in a complex plasma opens up the opportunity to examine properties and phase transitions of such electrorheological fluids in detail. Because of the limited one-dimensional symmetry, determining the configuration of a particle and recognizing strings in particle distributions is not always straightforward. Several approaches have already been used to analyse particle clouds while either considering each particle locally or considering the particle cloud as a whole without providing information about single particle configurations. This paper presents a new machine learning approach that takes advantage of particle distributions over the entire particle cloud and detects all string-like particles at once, using a convolutional neural network in form of an encoder-decoder network with asymmetric kernel convolutions. This not only enhances the result quality but also accelerates the evaluation process, possibly enabling real-time analyses on electrorheological phase transitions, while achieving an accuracy of over 95% on manually labelled data.