The ATHENA collaboration (Jørgensen et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 025002 (2005)) produced, by ballistic transfer into a 15 K, 3 T Penning–Malmberg trap, stacked positron plasmas of more than 1.2×1091.2\times 10^{9} particles and used a 15 MHz rotating-wall (RW) electric field to compress 20×10620\times 10^{6}-positron plasmas by a factor of more than 100, to 2.6×1010 cm−32.6\times 10^{10}\,\mathrm{cm}^{-3}, close to the torque-balanced density limit known for electron plasmas; no density ceiling and no Trivelpiece–Gould resonances were observed, and the authors identified as open future work the determination of the practical and fundamental density ceiling, the control and measurement of RW-induced heating (which corrupts non-destructive mode diagnostics), and the reduction of transfer and squeeze losses. The open question is which mechanisms set the maximum usable RW frequency, and hence the maximum steady-state positron density, in cryogenic high-field Penning–Malmberg traps — the multicell positron-trap program of Danielson, Hurst, and Surko (2013), operating at 5 T in a high-space-charge regime, reports that continuous, low-heating RW compression typically fails above roughly 8 MHz — and how RW heating and the plasma parameters can be reliably measured during active compression.

Background

A Penning–Malmberg trap confines a single-component ("non-neutral") plasma — here positrons — in a uniform axial magnetic field BB between electrostatic potential barriers at its ends. Such traps are the standard tool for storing cold antiparticles: at CERN's Antiproton Decelerator (AD), the ATHENA experiment produced cold antihydrogen by mixing antiprotons with a dense positron plasma in a nested Penning trap, where the dominant formation process, three-body recombination, has a rate roughly proportional to the square of the positron density, so both the number and the density of stored positrons directly set the antihydrogen yield. Because positrons must be accumulated in a buffer-gas stage at relatively high pressure and then delivered to a cryogenic, extreme-high-vacuum mixing trap, ATHENA developed a ballistic transfer scheme that moved pre-accumulated plasmas from a 0.14 T region into a 15 K trap immersed in a 3 T field, stacking them to more than 1.2×1091.2\times 10^{9} positrons (Jørgensen et al., 2005). To raise the density further, a segmented electrode is driven with azimuthally phased radio-frequency voltages — the "rotating wall" (RW) technique — which exerts a torque on the plasma, spins up its E×BE\times B rotation, and by angular-momentum conservation compresses the column radially. In the original mode-matching implementation the drive is tuned to Trivelpiece–Gould (TG) modes, the electrostatic oscillation eigenmodes of a magnetized plasma column, and must be retuned as the plasma compresses. Danielson and Surko subsequently identified a torque-balanced "strong drive" regime in which compression proceeds over a broad frequency range, the density rising until the plasma's E×BE\times B rotation frequency approaches the applied RW frequency, with the steady-state density only weakly dependent on drive amplitude; the absolute density cap for a magnetized single-component plasma is the Brillouin limit nB=ϵ0B2/(2m)n_{B}=\epsilon_{0}B^{2}/(2m), where ϵ0\epsilon_{0} is the vacuum permittivity and mm the particle mass. Non-destructive plasma diagnostics exploit the low-order electrostatic normal modes (e.g. the dipole (1,0)(1,0) and quadrupole (2,0)(2,0) modes), whose frequencies encode the plasma density, aspect ratio, and temperature. In the 2005 ATHENA measurements, a 15 MHz, 3 V RW compressed 20×10620\times 10^{6}-positron plasmas from 1.2×108 cm−31.2\times 10^{8}\,\mathrm{cm}^{-3} to 2.6±0.6×1010 cm−32.6\pm 0.6\times 10^{10}\,\mathrm{cm}^{-3}, within about 20% of the torque-balanced limit 3.1×1010 cm−33.1\times 10^{10}\,\mathrm{cm}^{-3} computed for electrons at 3 T and 15 MHz; compression rose uniformly with frequency with no TG resonances, RW operation heated the plasma by roughly 0.2 eV, the mode signals were lost or unreliable while the RW was on, and the quadrupole frequency could not separate compression from temperature effects. The authors stated that there was no indication of a density limit and that higher RW frequencies should enable higher densities, while also recording apparatus-specific losses: only 56% of the accumulator positrons survived transport through the low-field transfer region because of aperture restrictions, and the adiabatic squeeze into the harmonic well cost up to 35% of the particles (overall transfer-and-squeeze efficiency about 36%, with stacking of 40 shots taking about 2.5 h).

Problem Statement

Determine the ceiling — practical and fundamental — on the density of positron plasmas that can be reached and held by rotating-wall compression in a cryogenic, high-magnetic-field Penning–Malmberg trap, as posed by Jørgensen et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 025002 (2005)), who compressed 20×10620\times 10^{6}-positron plasmas to 2.6×1010 cm−32.6\times 10^{10}\,\mathrm{cm}^{-3} at 3 T and 15 MHz, observed no density limit, and stated that higher RW frequencies should enable higher densities. Concretely: (i) determine the maximum usable rotating-wall drive frequency, and hence the maximum steady-state positron density, identifying which of the candidate mechanisms set it — torque balance as the E×BE\times B rotation frequency approaches the drive frequency, the Brillouin density, Trivelpiece–Gould-mode and plasma-wave absorption in the regime rp/λD≫1r_{p}/\lambda_{D}\gg 1 (with rpr_{p} the plasma radius and λD\lambda_{D} the Debye length, the characteristic electrostatic screening length of the plasma), drive-electronics resonances and phase/amplitude imbalance, electrode-geometry effects such as the plasma-to-wall radius ratio, and RW-induced heating competing against synchrotron and other cooling channels — including why continuous, low-heating compression is reported to fail beyond roughly 8 MHz with only intermittent operation to about 17 MHz in the multicell positron-trap program (Danielson, Hurst, and Surko, 2013), which operates at 5 T and in a high-space-charge regime, a different apparatus and regime from the 2005 ATHENA single-cell measurements at 3 T, where 15 MHz compression reached 2.6×1010 cm−32.6\times 10^{10}\,\mathrm{cm}^{-3} with only about 0.2 eV of heating; and (ii) since RW operation heats the plasma (about 0.2 eV in the source experiment) and destroys the reliability of the non-destructive dipole/quadrupole mode diagnostics, establish methods to measure the positron plasma density and temperature during active compression and to disentangle compression from temperature effects. The listed mechanisms are candidate causes to be discriminated rather than a mandatory checklist. The apparatus-transfer items named in the same paper (aperture-loss-limited transfer through strong field gradients and adiabatic-squeeze losses) are not part of this problem; the problem is the density-ceiling and measurement question in the rotating-wall compression of dense cryogenic positron plasmas.

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