The motion of a charged particle in an electrodynamic chamber

The main motivation of this study is to aid the development of position control systems for centering a charged particle at the null point of an electrodynamic chamber (EDC). Position control depends on the particle motion within the EDC. The variables and factors that govern the motion of the particle within the EDC of a hyperboloidal configuration were determined. The particle motion in an EDC was measured by photodiode array shadowgraphy. The conditions under which the particle trajectory can be calculated from the equation of motion assuming constant electric field were determined. Under these conditions, one-to-one fit between the measured and the calculated trajectory was obtained. Methods for particle sizing based on the trajectory were developed. Three methods are presented here: 1) calculating the trajectory by the equation of motion by fitting the drag coefficient, 2) fast Fourier transform of the trajectory data to determine the characteristic times and length scales, and 3) filtering the field frequency and its harmonics and determining the averaged particle motion from which the characteristic times can be obtained. Correlations between the characteristic times and length scales with the drag parameters were defined.