Experiments on Agitators in Dusty Plasma Multi-rings

Dusty plasma multi-rings were created in a rf generated argon plasma. Several dust particle “agitators” which moved in and out of the plain of the rings were detected. The agitators disrupted the stable lattice structure of the multi-rings significantly increasing the motion of the neighboring dust particles. This disturbance was analyzed and it was found that as the anode voltage was increased, the speed of the disrupted particles also increased. In order to analyze the data, a Python code using the Hungarian filter algorithm was used to track the motion of the dust particles giving us over 500,000 data points per data run.