The sculpting of ultracold neutral plasmas represents a frontier in the experimental study of collective modes in strongly coupled plasmas. By extending the range of accessible length scales to less than tens of microns we gain access to a regime where The sculpting of ultracold neutral plasmas represents a frontier in the experimental study of collective modes in strongly coupled plasmas. By extending the range of accessible length scales to less than tens of microns we gain access to a regime where strong coupling's effects are predicted yet largely untested. To this effort, high resolution optical systems were designed, bench tested and implemented for sculpting and imaging ultracold neutral plasmas. Many complications and unexpected effects were documented to assist future experimental design considerations, including, those due to saturation and optical thickness, both of which limit the utility of 461 nm push beam modulations. It was concluded that sculpting should be performed on the 412 nm ionizing beam and real-time density space analysis is reliable for spatial frequencies up to 5 cyc/mm by using 4X magnified imaging. Higher spatial frequencies benefit from velocity space analysis due to extremely fast dynamics and low intensity levels.

We use an interferometric method for measuring the plasma density in a laser-induced plasma as a function of time. Any changes in the density within 5 ns of generation is due plasma expansion and not recombination. The analytic solution for plasma expansion derived for ultracold Neutral Plasmas describes the expansion of our laser produced Neon plasma of densities up to approximately 40 Torr. A model for the utlracold neutral plasmas, in comparison with measurements of our plasmas, can be used to extract an electron temperature. Currently our plasmas have shown to have an electron temperature of approximately 44 eV.

This thesis describes the measurements of collective effects in strongly coupled ultra-cold neutral plasmas (UNPs). It shows the implementation of experimental techniques that perturb either the density or velocity distribution of the plasma and it describes the subsequent excitation, observation and analysis of the aforementioned collective phenomena. UNPs are interesting in that they display physics of strongly coupled systems. For most plasma systems, collective effects are well described with classical hydrodynamic or kinetic descriptions. However, for strongly coupled systems, the Coulomb interaction energy between nearest neighbors exceeds the kinetic energy, and these descriptions must be modified as the plasma crosses over from a gas-like to liquid-like behavior. Strongly coupling can be found in exotic plasma systems found astrophysics, dusty plasmas, non-neutral trapped ion plasmas, intense-laser/matter interactions and inertial confinement fusion experiments. Compared to other strongly coupled plasmas, UNPs are ideal for studying collective effects in this regime since they have lower timescales, precisely controllable initial conditions and non-invasive diagnostics. Previous studies of UNPs concentrated on plasma expansion dynamics and some collective effects such as disorder induced heating, but little work had been done in relaxation or collision rates and collective modes in UNPs. This thesis presents a method for measuring collision rates by perturbing the velocity distribution of the plasma, observing plasma relaxation and measuring the relaxation rate. It also presents a new technique for observing collective modes in the plasma by perturbing the initial density of the plasma and how this results in the excitation of ion acoustic waves and a measurement of its dispersion relation. Finally, this thesis presents how this last technique can be used to create a gap in the center of the plasma and how this leads to hole propagation and plasma streaming and presents a characterization of both phenomena. The result of these experiments will be valuable for predicting the behavior of collective effects in other strongly coupled plasmas and for comparison with theories that describe them.