Charging and de-charging of dust particles in bulk region of a radio frequency discharge plasma

An analysis to investigate the effect of the dust particle size and density on the floating potential of the dust particles of uniform radius and other plasma parameters in the bulk region plasma of a RF-discharge in collisionless/collisional regime has been presented herein. For this purpose, the average charge theory based on charge balance on dust and number balance of plasma constituents has been utilized; a derivation for the accretion rate of electrons corresponding to a drifting Maxwellian energy distribution in the presence of an oscillatory RF field has been given and the resulting expression has been used to determine the floating potential of the dust grains. Further, the de-charging of the dust grains after switching off the RF field has also been discussed.