Long-range attraction of negatively charged dust particles in weakly ionized dense dust clouds

Abstract

The new Plasma Kristall Experiment (PK-4) is scheduled to fly on the International Space Station in 2012 with one of the experiments designed to investigate the existence of two fluid phases and a critical point in complex plasmas. A crucial issue is the parameter regime where the critical point could be found and this requires, as a first step, knowledge of the parameter range where dust-dust attraction can exist. This problem is addressed in the present work, extending previous works on long-range screening and attraction of negatively charged dust particles in plasmas. The roles of nonlinearities, ion-neutral collisions, electron dynamics, and plasma source on the depth and long-range behavior of the attractive well are established and the impact of these results on the PK-4 experiments is discussed. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.