Structures and turbulent relaxation in non-neutral plasmas

The transverse dynamics of a magnetized pure electron plasma confined in a Penning-Malmberg trap is analogous to that of a two-dimensional (2D) ideal fluid. The dynamics of a system in a regime of external forcing due to the application of time-dependent potentials on different azimuthal sectors of the confining circular wall is studied numerically by means of 2D particle-in-cell simulations. The evolution of turbulence starting from an annular initial density distribution is investigated for different kinds and parameters of forcing by means of wavelet-based multiresolution analysis. From an experimental point of view, the analyzed forcing technique is useful to excite or damp different diocotron perturbations and therefore for the control and manipulation of plasma evolution. Nonetheless, the numerical results indicate that even in a weak forcing regime the system evolution is sensitive to small initial density fluctuations.