Mechanisms of dust grain charging in plasma with allowance for electron emission processes

Abstract

The process of dust grain charging is described with allowance for secondary, ion-induced, photoelectric, and thermal electron emission from the grain surface. The roughness of the grain surface is taken into account. An intermediate charging regime involving ion–atom collisions and electron ionization in the perturbed plasma region is analyzed using the moment equations and Poisson’s equation. A calculation method is proposed that allows one to take into account the influence of all the above effects and determine the radius of the plasma region perturbed by the dust grain.