| 9 | 9 | * Discussion: experimental programme that can inform us in designing the next lens. This is based on the setup at Swansea and on the expertise of Chris Baker and Mike Charlton. As the lens has very similar parameters to the Gabor lens and an electron source already operational, it is a great place to investigate the operation of that lens in the regime that we need. As a very initial discussion, the investigation could focus on verifying which are the highest electron densities achievable with and without the rotating wall technique for a plasma column of large radius (1 cm or more) and the corresponding stability time and electron loss rate. As the very first step until the experimental programme is developed in more detail, we would like to start a short (few months) simulation programme. The objective is to gain more confidence in the simulation tool (the PIC code) which should also indicate if the field maps that we can generate for the lens are indeed accurate. We identified a couple of well-established experiments from the literature (from the San Diego group, JH Malmberg and CF Driscoll) and the objective is to reproduce the main plasma observations made in the papers, with emphasis on getting at least one quantitative agreement. We are still going through the literature to see if we can identify other experiments which would be more reasonable to simulate. Another possibility is to reproduce a couple of results from the Swansea group, but the results with electron plasmas were not published and Chris is trying now to find the lab-books. |
