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Plasma with ultra-fast cooling mechanism

18.02.2021

Researchers at Advanced Imaging of Matter have made a breakthrough by creating a completely new type of plasma by combining state-of-the-art technology using ultrashort laser pulses and ultracold atomic gases. They reported a new mechanism for electron cooling in such a plasma.

Matter exists in four states - solid, gas, liquid and plasma, with plasma being the most common state in the visible universe. It is made up of free charged particles such as ions and electrons. Plasma can exist in a huge range of temperatures and densities: from the core of the Sun to lightning or flames. The challenge in understanding plasma dynamics is to first identify universal mechanisms and then compare them to a controlled laboratory experiment.

At the Center for Optical Quantum Technology at the University of Hamburg, researchers cool and trap atoms with laser light. They use the intense light field of an ultrashort laser pulse to separate atoms into electrons and ions within 200 femtoseconds. A femtosecond is one millionth of one billionth of a second. Due to the extremely low initial temperature of atoms, ions have a temperature below 40 millikelvins, which is only slightly above the lowest possible temperature in the universe -273°C. On the contrary, electrons are initially very hot with a temperature of 4977°C, close to the temperatures on the surface of the Sun.

Hot electrons, directly generated by the ultrashort laser pulse, begin to escape and leave a positively charged region that captures some of the electrons in the ultracold plasma. Such a state of plasma has never been observed before. The researchers observed that trapped electrons in the plasma cool on ultra-fast time scales and measured the final temperature. In addition, they noticed that the plasma is stable for several hundred nanoseconds, which is a very long time for such systems.

Such ultracold plasma serves as a reference for theoretical models and can shed light on the extreme conditions present in inertial confinement fusion or astronomical objects such as white dwarfs. Moreover, the obtained ultracold electrons are interesting in themselves as a bright source for visualization of biological samples.

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