Aerodynamic focusing of high-density aerosols

• High-density aerosols are experimentally demonstrated to be focusable much like dilute aerosols.
• The focusing, however, is density-dependent, with a density-dependent effective Stokes number.
• The high-density aerosol may be a means to develop a plasma slab, a geometry difficult to achieve.

High-density micron-sized particle aerosols might form the basis for a number of applications in which a material target with a particular shape might be quickly ionized to form a cylindrical or sheet shaped plasma. A simple experimental device was built in order to study the properties of high-density aerosol focusing for 1 μm silica spheres. Preliminary results recover previous findings on aerodynamic focusing at low densities. At higher densities, it is demonstrated that the focusing properties change in a way which is consistent with a density dependent Stokes number.