Influence of plasma particle flow on dust grain charging and on particle number density

TL;DR

This paper investigates how plasma particle flow influences dust grain charging and plasma densities, revealing that including sources and sinks leads to stable dust potentials and plasma densities dependent on region size.

Contribution

Introduces a model incorporating plasma sources and sinks into dust charging dynamics, showing the impact on equilibrium potentials and densities, which was not addressed in previous models.

Findings

Dust grains reach stable, non-zero equilibrium potentials with plasma flow.

Plasma densities and dust potentials depend on the size of the region considered.

Larger regions lead to more negative equilibrium potentials and lower plasma densities.

Abstract

This study explores the dynamic evolution of dust electrical potential and plasma particle number densities with a focus on the charging of dust grains through electron and ion absorption, as described by the orbital motion limited (OML) theory. The initial model, which does not account for plasma particle sources and sinks, predicts that dust grains could eventually absorb all plasma particles, leading to a null electrical potential. To address this, we introduced source and sink terms considering a finite region of space in order to simulate real conditions. Our findings indicate that, with the inclusion of plasma particle flow into and out of the region, dust grains reach a stable, non-zero equilibrium potential and the electron and ion densities reach an equilibrium value. This equilibrium is dependent on the size of the region; larger regions result in lower plasma densities and more negative equilibrium potentials. For extensive regions, the dust potential initially mirrors the scenario without sources or sinks but eventually deviates, showing increasing negative values as the region size grows. This behavior is attributed to the electron source term surpassing the combined sink and absorption terms at certain intervals along time evolution.