Scientists have created a completely new type of plasma with an ultra-fast cooling mechanism

Matter exists in four states - solid, gas, liquid and plasma, with plasma being

the most common condition in the visibleUniverse. It consists 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 flame. The challenge to understanding plasma dynamics is to first identify universal mechanisms and then compare them to a controlled laboratory experiment.

“With the presented work we hope to contributecontribution to a broader understanding of the fundamental processes occurring in extreme plasma systems that are not directly accessible to experimental research"

Tobias Crocker from the research group of Prof. Dr. Markus Drescher.

At the Center for Optical Quantum TechnologiesAt 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 temperatures below 40 millikelvins, which is only slightly above the lowest possible temperature in the Universe of –273 ° C. In contrast, electrons are initially very hot, with a temperature of 4977 ° C, close to temperatures at the surface of the Sun.

Hot electrons directly generatedby an ultrashort laser pulse, begin to leave and leave a positively charged region, which captures some of the electrons in the ultracold plasma. This state of plasma has never been observed before. The researchers observed that the trapped electrons in the plasma are cooled at an ultrafast time scale, and measured the final temperature. In addition, they noticed that the plasma is stable for several hundred nanoseconds, which is a lot for such systems.

This ultracold plasma serves as a reference fortheoretical models and could shed light on the extreme conditions present in inertial confinement fusion or astronomical objects such as white dwarfs. Moreover, the resulting ultracold electrons themselves are interesting as a bright source for visualizing biological samples.

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