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The characteristics of the current convective instability in a hollow plasma column are described. Langmuir probe measurements of the radial form of the perturbed electron density reveal that the rotating helix is concentrated towards the outer wall of the discharge vessel. The instability has been shown to occur at a lower critical magnetic field for a hollow plasma cell than for a regular positive column cell of the same dimensions. Neither of these features are considered in previous theoretical work. For both the regular and the hollow positive column, the use of measured electron density profiles in numerically evaluating a stability criterion is shown to give improved agreement between theory and experiment.

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