Order in very cold confined plasmas

摘要

The study of the structure and dynamic properties of classical systems of charged particles confined by external forces, and cooled to very low internal energies, is the subject of this talk. An infinite system of identical charged particles has been known for some time to form a body-centered cubic lattice and is a simple classical prototype for condensed matter. Recent technical developments in storage rings, ion traps, and laser cooling of ions, have made it possible to produce such systems in the laboratory, though somewhat modified because of their finite size. I would like to discuss what one may expect in such systems and also show some examples of experiments. If we approximate the potential of an ion trap with an isotropic harmonic force F = (minus)Kr then the Hamiltonian for this collection of ions is the same as that for J. J. Thomson's 'plum pudding' model of the atom, where electrons were thought of as discrete negative charges imbedded in a larger, positive, uniformly charged sphere. The harmonic force macroscopically is canceled by the average space-charge forces of the plasma-, and this fixes the overall radius of the distribution. What remains, are the residual two-body Coulomb interactions that keep the particles within the volume as nearly equidistant as possible in order to minimize the potential energy. The configurations obtained for the minimum energy of small ionic systems (2) in isotropic confinement are shown in figure 1. Indeed this is an 'Exotic Atom' and fits well into the subject of this symposium honoring the 60th birthday of Professor Toshi Yamazaki.