Regular Article

Diagnostics and characterization of nanodust and nanodusty plasmas^★

¹ Institut für Experimentelle und Angewandte Physik, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 24098 Kiel, Germany
² Institut für Physik, Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität, 17489 Greifswald, Germany
³ Max-Planck Institut für Plasmaphysik, EURATOM Association, 17491 Greifswald, Germany
⁴ Institut für Theoretische Physik und Astrophysik, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 24098 Kiel, Germany
⁵ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK
⁶ Thin Film Division, IFM-Materials Physics, Linköping University, 581 83 Linköping, Sweden

^a e-mail: greiner@physik.uni-kiel.de

Received: 13 June 2017
Received in final form: 4 August 2017
Published online: 10 May 2018

Abstract

Plasmas growing or containing nanometric dust particles are widely used and proposed in plasma technological applications for production of nano-crystals and surface deposition. Here, we give a compact review of in situ methods for the diagnostics of nanodust and nanodusty plasmas, which have been developed in the framework of the SFB-TR24 to fully characterize these systems. The methods include kinetic Mie ellipsometry, angular-resolved Mie scattering, and 2D imaging Mie ellipsometry to get information about particle growth processes, particle sizes and particle size distributions. There, also the role of multiple scattering events is analyzed using radiative transfer simulations. Computed tomography and Abel inversion techniques to get the 3D dust density profiles of the particle cloud will be presented. Diagnostics of the dust dynamics yields fundamental dust and plasma properties like particle charges and electron and ion densities. Since nanodusty plasmas usually form dense dust clouds electron depletion (Havnes effect) is found to be significant.