Electromagnetic simulations of dusty plasmas

Abstract

Dusty plasmas are ionized gases containing small particles of solid matter, occurring e.g. in space, fusion devices or plasma processing discharges. While understanding the behavior of these plasmas is important for a variety of applications, an analytic treatment is difficult and numerical methods are required. Ideally, the dusty plasma would be treated kinetically, modeling each particle individually. However, this is in general far too expensive and approximations have to be used, like representing the electrons as fluids or treating Maxwell's equations in the electrostatic limit. Here we report on fully kinetic electromagnetic simulations of dusty plasmas, using the parallel kinetic plasma simulation code VORPAL. A brief review of the particle-in-cell (PIC) algorithm, including the model for modeling dust grains, and first results of single dust grain simulations are presented. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.