Investigating Transport of Dust Particles in Plasmas

An algorithm has been developed, which makes it possible to automatically extract individual trajectories of a large number of particles from fast imaging data, allowing a statistical analysis of particle trajectories under various plasma conditions, a better understanding of their influence on plasma properties, and a better characterization of the plasma itself. In this contribution, we focus on results obtained in a radio-frequency parallel plate reactor, where a large amount of micron-sized carbon dust is produced in situ. The use of the rescaled range analysis (R/S analysis) applied to dust particle displacements allows decomposing dust dynamic on different time scales. It is shown that dust displacement is dominated by collisions on short time scales whereas long term behaviour is strongly influenced by large scale fluctuations (© 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)