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Electronic and positronic guiding-center drift ions
1Department of Physics, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA.
Abstract:
A novel type of guiding-center drift ion is described. These ions occur only in strong magnetic fields. They consist of a neutral atom to which either an electron or positron is weakly bound, at a sufficiently large radius that it may be described by ExB drift dynamics. Such ions may occur naturally in astrophysical plasmas and may have been formed in recent antihydrogen experiments, where their presence would provide proof that deeply bound H atoms are being created.
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Drift Current:
The drift of charge carriers is started by an external electric field (E). Charged particles, such as electrons and holes, experience an acceleration between collisions with lattice atoms. For electrons, this results in a drift velocity (vd) given by:

