Interactions Between Two Counterpropagating Plasma Bullets

Abstract

Cold plasma jets produced by pulsed discharges have recently attracted a lot of attention because of their unusual physical properties enabling the development of new applications, particularly for plasma medicine. ICCD pictures of these jets revealed that they were not continuous plasmas but composed of plasma bullets propagating at very high velocity. In this paper, pictures of the interaction of two counterpropagating bullets have been taken to give insights into the physics of the bullets and to clarify which kind of models could be relevant to describe the bullet properties.