Measurements of the potential and current structures of auroral-like plasma terminating on neutral gas

Details Measurements of the potential and current structures of auroral-like plasma terminating on neutral gas Measurements of the potential and current structures of auroral-like plasma terminating on neutral gas

Dec 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011agufmsm13a2026c&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2011, abstract #SM13A-2026

Physics

[2704] Magnetospheric Physics / Auroral Phenomena, [2721] Magnetospheric Physics / Field-Aligned Currents And Current Systems, [2736] Magnetospheric Physics / Magnetosphere/Ionosphere Interactions

Scientific paper

A unique new plasma source1 large enough so that electrons are not in direct contact with any wall enables, for the first time, a laboratory study of the auroral atmospheric boundary. The 3-D potential and current structures of the quiescent (Δ n/n <5%), magnetized (dia = 30 ρ i) plasma terminating on a neutral gas have been measured and compared to theory. A thermally emissive LaB6 cathode biased <400 V ionizes a background helium gas to make a plasma (L<30 m). The plasma ending on the gas has has no net current, however, complicated auroral-like closed-current structures and drifts exist throughout the system. Hot electrons carry field aligned currents which close by ion cross field Pederson currents. Langmuir and emissive probes are used to measure the plasma electric fields and other basic plasma properties. The 3-D nature of the currents is verified by magnetic probes. A strong field-aligned neutral collision dominated double layer (Δ φ /kTe ˜ 1) terminates the auroral structure where the plasma pressure matches the neutral gas pressure. In this region, electric fields and neutral-collision dominated conductivities allow comparable cross field and field aligned currents, allowing closure of the current systems. The experiment was carried out at the ETPD at UCLA, a large toroidal device (major radius = 5 m, 2 m wide, 3 m tall) with a pulsed (1 Hz) DC plasma discharge (tdisch ˜20ms, Bt ˜250G, and Bv<6G, Rplasma=10cm, ne<1013cm3, Te<10eV, and Ti ˜ Te). Work funded by the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation and performed at the Basic Plasma Science Facility at UCLA.

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