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Heating Rates and Enhanced Equilibration Rates with Strongly Correlated Ions in a Penning-Malmberg Trap
Published
Author(s)
John J. Bollinger, Marie J. Jensen, T Hasegawa, D H. Dubin
Abstract
We laser cool up to 1069Be+ ions to ~ 1 mK in a Penning-Malmberg trap and measure the ion temperature as a function of time after turning off the cooling laser. We observe a rapid heating of the ions when the their temperature in a direction parallel to the magnetic field increases above 10 mK and show that this is due to the equilibration of a warm (~ few Kelvin) impurity-ion cyclotron motion with the parallel motion of the 9Be+ ions. The observed equilibration is more than 14 orders of magnitude faster than that predicted by theory which is valid in the absence of correlations, and is closely related to the enhancement of nuclear reactions in dense stellar interiors, first predicted over 50 years ago by Salpeter. Finally we describe an attempt to use the measured heating rate of the 9Be+ ions to observe the latent heat of the predicted solid-liquid phase transition.
Proceedings Title
Non-Neutral Plasma Physics VI: Proceedings of the Workshop on Non-Neutral Plasmas,
Bollinger, J.
, Jensen, M.
, Hasegawa, T.
and Dubin, D.
(2006),
Heating Rates and Enhanced Equilibration Rates with Strongly Correlated Ions in a Penning-Malmberg Trap, Non-Neutral Plasma Physics VI: Proceedings of the Workshop on Non-Neutral Plasmas,, Aarhus, , [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=50410
(Accessed October 13, 2025)