Observation of the ion-ion instability and its suppression mechanism in a dusty double plasma device

Abstract

Ion-ion instability is excited due to the counter streaming of ion beams in any plasma system. An experiment has been carried out to observe the ion-ion instability in dusty plasma and in presence of different gas compositions viz., H2, Ar, Xe and He. The experiment is performed in a double plasma device consisting of 90 cm in diameter and 120 cm in length and separated by a mesh grid of 81% optical transparency. Glass beads of 10 mm average dust distributions are used as a dust grains for the whole set of experiment and are allowed to fall within a particular region of plasma column inside the system. The growing and suppression of ion-ion instability is observed by translating the probe spatially with respect to different dust density compositions and compared the same also in presence of other gasses. The suppression mechanism of this kind of instability in plasmas was explained by RF pumps[1]. However, in this experimental finding the suppression phenomena are discussed in terms of dust density inside the system. The instability is found to be suppressed completely at a critical dust density (Ndcr). The complete set of experimental results will be tried to explain with the numerical solution of Van der Pol Equation.