Dust grains of various shapes and materials can be found anywhere in the space where the temperature decreases under a melting point. Many plasma processes are driven by the grain charge but, on the other hand, dust grain charging can be influenced by several different processes, too. Among others, secondary emission can play a dominant role wherever the plasma is hot. In the present paper, a f...

The Jovian dust streams are high-speed bursts of submicron-sized particles traveling in the same direction from a source in the Jovian system. Since their discovery in 1992, they have been observed by three spacecraft: Ulysses, Galileo and Cassini. The source of the Jovian dust streams is dust from Io’s volcanoes. The charged and traveling dust stream particles have particular signatures in fre...

By combining the results from a self-consistent 2D dusty plasma fluid model and a 3D N-body code, the equilibrium position and crystal structure were determined for dust particles levitated in the sheath in a modified Gaseous Electronics Conference (GEC) reference cell, in which the lower electrode was heated or cooled. The Debye length, charge and electric field were reconstructed on a sub-mil...

We recently questioned the treatment of a dust particle as a perfect absorber for electrons and ions and proposed a surface model for the charge of a dust particle in a quiescent plasma which combines the microscopic physics at the grain boundary (sticking into and desorption from external surface states) with the macrophysics of the discharge (plasma collection fluxes). Within this model the c...

The possible role of magnetic anomalies on Mars in gravitational enhancement of separation of charged dust is considered. It is known that charges become spatially separated by differential transport and gravitational sedimentation because the charge polarity of particles of dust depends on the particle size—where smaller particles are negatively charged and larger particles are positively char...

Due to the gravitational force, clouds of dust and gas in the interstellar medium can contract and form stars and planet systems. Here we show that if the dust grains are electrically charged then the self-gravitation can be balanced by the “electrostatic pressure” and the collapse can be halted. In this case, the dust cloud may form soft dust planets, having the weight of a small moon or satel...

Dusty plasmas in a gas discharge often feature a stable void, i.e., a dust-free region inside the dust cloud. This occurs under conditions relevant to both plasma processing discharges and plasma crystal experiments. The void results from a balance of the electrostatic and ion drag forces on a dust particle. The ion drag force is driven by a flow of ions outward from an ionization source and to...

The occurrence and propagation of large amplitude dust-acoustic solitary waves (DASWs) are studied in a three-component plasma consisting of negatively charged dust grains and electron-positron pairs by employing a pseudopotential technique. Here, we focus on a superthermal plasma modeled by a -like distribution and consider a finite temperature for dust particulates. It is shown that the solit...