Some Cool Plasma

In order to check out the gas handling system, Anatol and I ran the system using just atmosphere. We made sure that it was possible to attain a balance between inflow (from the bottle/atmosphere) and outflow (through the pump) at whatever pressures we wanted. As the system was fully put together at this point, we played around with some atmospheric plasmas.

The first plasma is at high vacuum ( < 20 mTorr) at about 10 kV. The jet coming off the upper left stabilized and became more "focused" the longer the plasma was maintained.


The second plasma is at the same voltage but at a much lower vacuum (around 1 Torr). At this pressure, the plasma only existed right around the grid, making the grid itself appear to glow.