Coulomb cluster is a phenomenon in classical physics which is under substantial amount of attention. These clusters are characterized by the strong electrostatic interaction of highly charged particle trapped within an external confining potential. Examples of such systems include ion traps and quantum dots. Investigation in this area had been further encouraged in the past few decades with the...

The present work investigates the parametric instability of parallel propagating circularly polarized Alfvén pump waves in a collisional dusty plasma. It is demonstrated that the relative drift between the charged dust and the electrons and ions gives rise to the Hall effect resulting in the modified pump wave characteristics. Although the linearized fluid equations with periodic coefficients a...

Dust particles effectively charged by plasma recently have been optically observed to exhibit crystalline phases not expected of Wigner or Yukawa crystals. Under varying conditions the crystal sometimes appears as deformed and oriented three-dimensional close-packed lattices of bcc, fcc, or hcp type, but mostly as a triangular array of vertical chains of particles. The unusual phases are shown ...

A method has been developed to heat and control temperature in a two-dimensional monolayer dusty plasma. A monolayer of highly charged polymer microspheres was suspended in a plasma sheath. The microspheres interacted with a Yukawa potential and formed a triangular lattice. Laser manipulation was used to apply random kicks to the particles. Two focused laser beams were moved rapidly around draw...

A dust cloud trapped in a plasma often contains a dust-free region ("void") near the plasma center. This void has important effects [1, 2]: it induces a spatial inhomogeneity of the dust particle distribution and is at the origin of many intricate unstable phenomena. One of this behavior is the heartbeat instability consisting of successive contractions and expansions of the void [3]. This inst...

Strongly coupled plasmas – in which the average potential energy per particle dominates over the average kinetic energy – appear in a wide variety of physical systems. Among these systems, dust plasma crystals and liquids realized in low-pressure gas discharges by dispersing mesoscopic grains into the plasma have attracted a lot of attention during the past years. We describe the experimental r...

We show that dipole-dipole interactions induced by gravitational force and possibly ion-stream drag force give rise to stable triangular and oriented cubic crystalline structures recently observed in a dusty plasma, as opposed to only unoriented cubic close-packed structures usually expected of Wigner crystals. In certain cases the dipole interaction may flatten the crystal significantly. We ca...

Article history: Received 23 May 2011 Accepted 6 June 2011 Available online 14 June 2011 Communicated by V.M. Agranovich Dust heating in dusty plasmas due to thermal electric field fluctuations and dust acoustic waves is examined. It is shown that dust particles acquire large random motion in fluctuating electric fields (within dust cloud) of background plasma causing dust electrostatic pressur...

A macroscopic Coulomb crystal of solid particles in a plasma has been observed. Images of a cloud of 7-p,m "dust" particles, which are charged and levitated in a weakly ionized argon plasma, reveal a hexagonal crystal structure. The crystal is visible to the unaided eye. The particles are cooled by neutral gas to 310 K, and their charge is >9800e, corresponding to a Coulomb coupling parameter r...