Kinetic Particle Simulations of Dust Charging in Low Temperature Collisionless Plasmas

Abstract

This paper presents a fully-kinetic numerical investigation of charging of dust particulates in low temperature collisionless plasmas. The recently developed Parallel Immersed-Finite-Element Particle-in-Cell (PIFE-PIC) code is utilized to self-consistently resolve the plasma environment and charging of immersed materials. This model explicitly includes the materials property (dielectric constant) of dust grains. Multiple dust grain configurations were considered and compared to find how single and multiple dust grains are charged in a stationary plasma environment.