Electrostatic waves in a Maxwellian dusty plasma with variable charge on dust particles

Abstract

A kinetic formulation developed to analyze wave propagation in dusty plasmas, which takes into account the variation of the charge of the dust particles due to inelastic collisions with electrons and ions, is utilized to study the propagation and damping of electrostatic waves with wave number exactly parallel to the external magnetic field and Maxwellian distributions for the electrons and ions in the equilibrium. It is shown that, due to the presence of the dust, the damping of Langmuir waves in the region of large wavelengths is increased as compared to conventional Landau damping. Langmuir waves in the occurrence of collisional charging of dust particles also feature weak damping for small wavelengths, which vanishes if the effect of collisional charging of the dust particles is neglected in the dispersion relation. It is also shown that the damping of ion-acoustic waves is modified by the presence of the dust, and that some damping effect due to the dust particles remains even if the effect of collisional charging of dust particles is neglected in the dispersion relation.