Effect of collisions on dust particle charging via particle-in-cell Monte-Carlo collision

Abstract

In this paper, the effect of collisions on the charging and shielding of a single dust particle immersed in an infinite plasma is studied. A Monte-Carlo collision (MCC) algorithm is implemented in the particle-in-cell DEMOCRITUS code to account for the collisional phenomena which are typical of dusty plasmas in plasma processing, namely, electron-neutral elastic scattering, ion-neutral elastic scattering, and ion-neutral charge exchange. Both small and large dust particle radii, as compared to the characteristic Debye lengths, are considered. The trends of the steady-state dust particle potential at increasing collisionality are presented and discussed. The ions and electron energy distributions at various locations and at increasing collisionality in the case of large particle radius are shown and compared to their local Maxwellians. The ion-neutral charge-exchange collision is found to be by far the most important collisional phenomenon. For small particle radius, collisional effects are found to be important also at low level of collisionality, as more ions are collected by the dust particle due to the destruction of trapped ion orbits. For large particle radius, the major collisional effect is observed to take place in proximity of the presheath. Finally, the species energy distribution functions are found to approach their local Maxwellians at increasing collisionality.