Influence of polarization effects on charging of dust particles in a plasma

In a dusty plasma one of the most important characteristics of micron-sized particles, called grains, is their electrical charge that can range from dozens to thousands of the elementary. This usually results in that the dust component of the plasma turns a strongly non-ideal system in which the average interaction potential energy is of the order of or even exceeds the thermal kinetic energy. In this case it is rather clear that physically meaningful properties of the dust component are completely governed by the intergrain interaction energy, which depends on their charge to a large extent.