Dusty plasmas under weightlessness

Dusty (complex) plasmas provide a fascinating system to study fundamental processes in many-particle systems since the (dust) particles can be imaged and followed on the kinetic individual-particle level. Gravity is often a major problem when experimenting with dusty plasmas since, on Earth, larger dust clouds are compressed to the lower edge of the plasma. We have performed experiments on parabolic flights without the influence of the disturbing force of gravity where we have measured the dust motion in three dimensions by stereoscopic techniques. This makes new properties of the dust-plasma system accessible for measurements, such as self-excited waves, forces at the dust boundary or the dynamics of phase separation. Moreover, I will present the planned multi-user facility for complex plasma experiments COMPACT on the ISS.