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Updated: Nov 4, 2025

Non-equilibrium Microwave Plasma for Efficient High Temperature Chemistry
Published on: August 1, 2017
Ion Heating and Flow Driven by an Instability Found in Plasma Couette Flow
J Milhone1, K Flanagan1, J Egedal1
1Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1150 University Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA.
Abstract:
We present the first observation of instability in weakly magnetized, pressure dominated plasma Couette flow firmly in the Hall regime. Strong Hall currents couple to a low frequency electromagnetic mode that is driven by high-β (>1) pressure profiles. Spectroscopic measurements show heating (factor of 3) of the cold, unmagnetized ions via a resonant Landau damping process. A linear theory of this instability is derived that predicts positive growth rates at finite β and shows the stabilizing effect of very large β, in line with observations.
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