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Updated: Jun 3, 2026

Experimental Methods of Dust Charging and Mobilization on Surfaces with Exposure to Ultraviolet Radiation or Plasmas
Published on: April 3, 2018
Charge on the dust in the plasma
B P Pandey1, S V Vladimirov, A A Samarian
1Department of Physics and Astronomy, Macquarie University, Sydney NSW 2109, Australia. birendra.pandey@mq.edu.au
Abstract:
The grain in the plasma gets charged until the net plasma flux to the grain surface vanishes. In the absence of any analytical formula, this ambipolar condition is utilized to compute the grain charge indirectly. The present work proposes an approximate analytical expression for the grain charge that is exact in the asymptotic limit and in which the relative error between analytical and numerically computed solutions is less than 3%. Using this formula, we show that, much like the plasma sheath, the Bohm criterion is satisfied near the dust surface.
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