Plasma absorption effects on collisions of positively charged dust grains in dusty plasmas

Abstract

The plasma absorption effects on the collisions of positively charged dust grains are investigated in dusty plasmas. The method of stationary phase and the effective interaction potential containing the attractive part are employed to obtain the scattering cross-section between a pair of positively charged dust grains as a function of the impact parameter, collision energy, electron and ion temperatures, and Debye length. The result shows that the plasma absorption effects on the dust surface strongly suppress the total scattering cross-section. It is also shown that the plasma absorption effects on the scattering cross-section decrease with an increase of the ratio of the electron temperature to the ion temperature. In addition, the plasma absorption effects are found to be decreased with increasing the collision velocity. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3562137]