Dust confinement and dust-acoustic waves in weakly magnetized anodic plasmas

Experiments on dust-acoustic waves (DAW) in a magnetized anodic plasma are presented for the regime of low collisionality. The dust trapping and the self-excited and synchronized DAW dynamics are studied. Based on Langmuir and emissive probe measurements the dust confinement is found to be well described with respect to size, stability, and position of the dust cloud by an effective potential well formed by ion drag and Coulomb forces. Moreover, the measurements indicate the necessity for a kinetic model for the wave dispersion. By means of singular value decomposition the local wavelengths and growth rates of the waves are measured systematically. It is found that the measured mean wave number is well described by kinetic theory, while the theoretical growth rates overestimate the experiments. A novel observation for the DAW is a systematic variation of the wavelength inside the dust cloud.(c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.