3D particle diagnostic for complex plasma laboratories on the ISS

Kurzfassung

3D particle diagnostic for complex plasma laboratories on the ISS Complex plasmas are an almost ideal model system to study dynamics and kinetics of fundamental effects like phase transitions, waves, and laminar as well as turbulent flows. This studies are performed in 2D views for many years with comparatively simple camera setups. To get 3D information about the particle cloud you can either move the 2D camera and laser in the direction of sight or use much more complicated and less robust systems like rotating or swinging mirrors. This scanning methods have the disadvantage that the 3D information of the particle motion is obtained at different time steps. For a real-time optical 3D diagnostic, holographic camera systems or multi view systems (stereoscope) can be used. Some of this methods require complicated and also not very robust setups, which is no problem for lab experiments, but there gravity prevents the generation of large 3D particle systems. So a 3D particle diagnostic small enough to integrate into a space setup and robust enough to stand a launch to the international space station (ISS) is needed for the investigation of long term experiments in good micro gravity conditions. For this goal our group is developing a robust and compact stereoscopic camera system. In addition we compare this to a light field motion picture camera system, which its build by the german company raytrix. The systems will be optimized with regard to the needs of the next generation complex plasma laboratory PlasmaLab which is to be launched within EKOPlasma mission in 2019/20. This work and some of the authors are funded by DLR/BMWi (FKZ 50WM1441).