EXPERIMENTS ON ION WAKE FIELDS

Ion wake fields are excited and investigated in quasineutral two compo nent plasmas in a standard double plasma machine. The period of the os cillating wake field decreases as the plasma density increases. The wa ke held amplitude depended upon the resonance between the perturbation duration and the wake field period rather than the perturbation ampli tude. The experimental results are in agreement with the theoretical m odel that we have recently proposed. (C) 1997 American Institute of Ph ysics.