Ion drag force on a small grain in highly collisional weakly anisotropic plasma: Effect of plasma production and loss mechanisms

Abstract

The ion drag force acting on a small absorbing grain has been calculated in highly collisional plasma with slowly drifting ions taking into account plasma production and loss processes in the vicinity of the grain. It is shown that the strength of the plasma production and loss mechanisms not only affects the magnitude of the ion drag force, but also determines the direction of the force. The parameter regimes for the "positive" and "negative" ion drag forces have been identified. In addition, the qualitative features of the electric potential distribution around the grain in isotropic conditions ͑in the absence of the ion drift͒ are investigated.

Basic Processes in Complex (Dusty) Plasmas: Charging, Interactions, and Ion Drag Force

“…[99] for the case of highly collisional plasmas. This has been done by simply adding the corresponding source and loss terms to the ion continuity equation (26).…”

“…This topic has been investigated in Refs. [91,99] using the hydrodynamic approximation and assuming that plasma production is due to electron impact ionization, while plasma loss is either due to electron-ion volume recombination or ambipolar diffusion towards the discharge chamber walls and electrodes. Conditions under which plasma production and loss mechanisms are of minor importance have been identified [99].…”

Phase Transitions in Two-Dimensional Complex Plasmas

“…Especially in the plasma sheath region between the plasma and a wall, ions are accelerated towards the wall due to the electric field inside the sheath which points to the wall. The ion drag force therefore tends to push particles located in the plasma sheath toward the walls [101,102,103,104].…”

Large quasineutral electron velocity oscillations in radial expansion of an ionizing plasma

“…[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] Most existing works on the flow of reacting or ionizing gases invoke linear, or nonlinear but small amplitude, perturbations around a steady state. [7][8][9][10][11][12][13] However, for phenomena initially far from equilibrium, especially in the interaction of intense laser with matter and in astrophysical or nuclear explosions, such perturbation approaches are not applicable since the field variations can be larger, or even much larger, than the background fields. In this case, a fully nonlinear treatment of the governing equations is called for.…”