Regenerative Soot-II: Emission of carbon clusters from sooting plasma

A hollow cathode source with a specially designed cusp magnetic field B whose z component is a function of radius and the azimuth angle, provides clustering environment to the sputtered carbon atoms and ions. The distinctive features of the source are its sooting properties that depend upon the two well-defined regions within the discharge. The cusp field drives both of these regions but in different modes. One region ionizes the source gas, introduces the sputtered carbon from the graphite hollow cathode while the other is the collision dominated gyration motion of the positive carbon ions along the z component of the magnetic field contours. Tunability of plasma discharge characteristics provides the tool to investigate clustering in the sooting plasma