Complex (dusty) plasmas are composed of a weakly ionized gas and charged microparticles and represent the plasma state of soft matter. Complex plasmas have several remarkable features: Dynamical time scales associated with microparticles are “stretched” to tens of milliseconds, yet the microparticles themselves can be easily visualized individually. Furthermore, since the background gas is dilute, the particle dynamics in strongly coupled complex plasmas is virtually undamped, which provides a direct analogy to regular liquids and solids in terms of the atomistic dynamics. Finally, complex plasmas can be easily manipulated in different ways—also at the level of individual particles. Altogether, this gives us a unique opportunity to go beyond the limits of continuous media and study — at the kinetic level — various generic processes occurring in liquids or solids, in regimes ranging from the onset of cooperative phenomena to large strongly coupled systems.

Our laboratory focuses on the physics of the binary complex plasmas, which compose of two species (in terms of sizes or materials) of microparticles confined in the weakly ionized gas.

[1] AV Ivlev, GE Morfill, Review of Modern Physics, 81(4):1353-1403 (2009)