Measurements and Modeling of Dust Grain Transport in Strongly Magnetized Plasmas

The investigation of dusty plasmas in strongly magnetized plasmas can be very challenging. Here, strongly magnetized will mean operating at magnetic fields such that the electron and ion dynamics are dominated by the presence of the magnetic field (i.e, electron and ion Hall parameters, H = cyclotron frequency/neutral collision frequency » 1). Under these conditions, in low temperature, capacitively coupled, rf-generated plasmas, the background plasma can experience self-organization into filamentary structures that have their own complex dynamics [1]–[3]. This presentation reports on the development of new experimental and computational studies that seek to: (1) identify new configurations for spatially and temporally localizing filaments; (2) perform measurements of dust particle dynamics near these localized filaments; (3) use single and multi-particle simulations to understand the dust particle dynamics.