Diagnostics of the laser carbon plasma in different environments during DLC deposition

Summary form only given. Construction of the West Virginia University (WVU) Large Experiment on Instabilities and Anisotropies (LEIA) is now complete. LEIA is designed to investigate a wide variety of high beta, space relevant plasma phenomena. Of particular interest are electromagnetic instabilities driven by the free energy associated with non-isotropic ion distributions, i.e., different parallel and perpendicular ion temperatures. These instabilities occur at plasma betas (P=87tkTIB2) of order unity and ion temperature anisotropies, perpendicular divided by parallel, over the range 0.25 to 4.0. The plasma for LEIA is generated with a steady-state helicon plasma source.