Experimental study on dipole motion of an ion plasma confined in a linear Paul trap

Abstract

The compact non-neutral plasma trap systems named “S-POD” have been developed at Hiroshima University as an experimental simulator of beam dynamics. S-POD is based either on a linear Paul trap or on a Penning trap and can approximately reproduce the collective motion of a relativistic charged-particle beam observed in the center-of-mass frame. We here employ the Paul trap system to investigate the behavior of an ion plasma near a dipole resonance. A simple method is proposed to calibrate the data of secular frequency measurements by using the dipole instability condition. We also show that the transverse density profile of an ion plasma in the trap can be estimated from the time evolution of ion losses caused by the resonance.