Turbulence and relaxation in 2D non-neutral plasmas

Magnetically confined electron columns evolve as near-ideal 2D fluids, allowing quantitative study of instabilities, turbulence, relaxation, and self-organization. We find that rapid global symmetrization of a distorted column can occur by a decay instability due to nonlinear beat wave damping. In the free relaxation of vortex turbulence, we find that the relaxation rate is limited by vorticity holes which persist for hundreds of rotations even in strong background shear. Finally, we observe that turbulence self-organizes to a meta-equilibrium state which is accurately predicted by minimization of enstrophy for a range of unstable initial conditions. copyright 1995 American Institute of Physics