Charging of a conducting sphere moving in a weakly ionized gas under an arbitrarily oriented external uniform electric field

Attraction of dust particles in current-carrying recombination plasma: influence of the space charge and recombination processes

“…It is shown that subject to the fulfillment of the following conditions: (1) the plasma is collisional and is situated in a strong external electric field, (2) weak recombination processes take place, (3) the diffusion effects are sufficiently weak, and (4) the distance between the particles exceeds the particle radii significantly; the effects of the space charge jointly with the recombination processes lead to the fact that the energy of interaction of two "dust particle-space charge" systems can correspond to their attraction. This consideration is significant, e.g., for various problems of the thunderstorm electricity theory [14][15][16] Thus, electrostatic interaction between large particles can lead to the formation of ordered structures in a collisional dusty plasma. However, the achievement of full understanding of this process requires further investigation.…”

“…On the one hand, such an approach imposes rather severe constraints (3) on the plasma parameters, and on the other hand, it also allows one to consider the plasma, in which the main charge carriers are oppositely charged ions (such a situation is typical of, e.g., storm clouds [14][15][16] (3) are fulfilled in the atmospheric, weakly ionized plasma. The density of light ions in the troposphere is N 0 ∼ 10 2 -10 4 cm −3 .…”

“…To find the structure of the self-consistent field in the proximity of the body, we will follow [15,16] and neglect the space charge field in this region entirely. In this case, one can satisfy the boundary conditions of electrodynamics on the surface of an ideally conducting particle by representing the field out of the particle as a superposition of the external field E 0 , the field E 0 of a point dipole with the momentum p = a 3 , which is placed at the center of the particle, and the field of an unknown point charge Q d , which is also placed at the particle center:…”

“…The problem of interaction of dust particles in a plasma is closely related to the problem of their charging and formation of the space charge regions in their proximity [13][14][15][16][17]. Essentially, this paper is the continuation of [17], where the conducting sphere was considered as a dust particle, and its charging in a stream of weakly ionized plasma under the influence of a strong external field was studied allowing for the recombination process and the space charge effects.…”