Observation and model of an ellipsoidally symmetric velocity space distribution in a weakly-coupled dusty plasma

The spatially resolved phase space distribution was measured for a dusty plasma system. Analysis of the velocity space component of the distributions revealed that the standard assumption of a spherically symmetric velocity space is not applicable to the observed system. The more general, ellipsoidally symmetric, multi-normal distribution function was applied to model the velocity space and is compared to the canonical spherically symmetric model.