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Superparamagnetic Dusty Plasma Experiments in Microgravity

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Superparamagnetic Dusty Plasma Experiments in Microgravity

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  • Author: Uwe Konopka
A dusty plasma is a plasma containing nanometer to micron-sized solid particles (dust) that aquire an electrical charge Qd due to the interaction with the plasma environment. The charging process can be rather complicated. However, in the case of a low temperature (LT) plasma, taking into account only electron and ion currents, the dust net charge can be estimated by Orbit Motion Limited (OML) theory, and depends only on the particle radius R and the electron temperature Te (typically kBTe ≈ 2 − 3 eV ). A rule-of-thumb is Qd ≈ −1700e R[µm]kBTe[eV ] for these environments.

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