Phenomena associated with complex (dusty) plasmas in the ionosphere during high-speed meteor showers

Abstract

Formation of dusty plasmas in the Earth’s ionosphere at 80–120 km altitudes during high-speed meteor showers and its detectable manifestations are discussed. Emphasis is given to ground-based observations such as detection of low-frequency (<50 Hz) ionospheric radio noise, ground-based observations of infrasonic waves, and amplification of the intensity of green radiation at 557.7 nm from a layer at the 110–120 km altitude in the lower ionosphere. The physical processes responsible for these manifestations are considered.

Effect of nonextensive velocity distribution on the filamentation instability in a current-driven dusty plasma

“…Numerous satellite observations indicate clearly the existence of high energy tail velocity distribution of particles in space plasmas. Such distribution has been successfully applied to stellar plasmas, solar winds and solar neutrinos as well as to the peculiar velocity function of galaxies clusters and interplanetary mediums (Lavagnoet et al 1998;Leubner and Vörös 2005;Tsallis 2009). It is also known that dusty plasma particles interact with each other via the Coulombian long-range interactions and usually depart from the Maxwellian distribution.…”

“…It is known that dusty plasmas (also called complex plasmas) are four-component plasmas containing neutral atoms, electrons, ions, and dust grains that are extremely massive (Havnesa et al 2001;Rosenberg 2001), cometary tails (Mamun and Shukla 2002), interstellar media (Hartquist et al 1996), and ionosphere (Kopnin et al 2009) as well as laboratory devices such as tokamaks (Pigarov et al 2005;De Angelis 2006) and stellarators (Winter and Gebauer 1999). The presence of charged dust grains in a plasma not only could considerably modify the behavior of oscillation modes and instabilities but also excite a large number of new collective eigenmodes, such as dust-acoustic mode whose phase velocity is much smaller than the electron and ion thermal velocities and much greater than the dust thermal velocity.…”

Small scale structures of a mesospheric dusty plasma

“…New phenomena associated with the behaviors of the microparticles have been discovered and extensively studied, such as collective modes (Rao et al, 1990), dust lattices (Thomas et al, 1994), and localized structures (Bharuthram and Shukla, 1992;Yu et al, 1992;Ma et al, 1997;Kopnin et al, 2004), etc. In the earth's ionosphere, the microparticles grow as a result of the condensation of water vapor or the showers of micrometeoroid (Klumov et al, 2005;Kopnin et al, 2009). They play important roles in the explanation of the phenomena associated with radar backscatter signals and noctilucent clouds (Havnes et al, 1992;Havnes, 2002;Thomas et al, 1991).…”

Abnormal Kinetic Energy of Charged Dust Particles in Plasmas

“…The influence of dust particle charge fluctuations on kinetic temperature is considered on the basis of the Langevin approach, which allows to get the value of two orders of magnitude below the experimental value [8]. Spatial fluctuations of dust particle charges [9,12,14,20] also lead to the increase of kinetic energy of dust particles. However this mechanism is based on a finite charging time of dust particles and gives an estimate of the kinetic temperature many orders of magnitude below the experimental value.…”