Congratulations to John Meyer for successfully defending his PhD dissertation on "Experiments in Flowing and Freely Expanding Dusty Plasmas."

"John performed experiments on the formation of flowing dusty plasmas and their interaction with various obstacles; and on the expansion of clouds of negative charged dust particles. In the first set of experiments, he observed the formation of a bow shock and wake that formed when a supersonically flowing charged dust cloud encountered a wire biased to repel it. In the second part of his thesis research, he performed detailed studies of the evolution of clouds of negatively charged dust particles after their confining forces were removed when the plasma was suddenly turned off. He observed that the rapid decay of the plasma diminished the Debye shielding of the particles which resulted in a rapid expansion of the cloud due to the bare Coulomb repulsion between the particles."
— Robert Merlino, PhD advisor

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