Abstract
The presence of dust grains is a common phenomenon in the space environment. Grains can be charged by many different processes (e.g., photoemission, attachment of electrons/ions, the secondary emission, etc.). If the grain's surface potential becomes high enough, one can observe field emission of ions or electrons. We are trapping a single dust grain in a Paul trap, expose it to a low-energy electron beam, and investigate the evolution of its charge-to-mass ratio with respect to the energy of primary electron beam. We use micron-sized (D = 2–11 μm) glass grains and charge them up to -300 V of surface potentials; it corresponds to the electric field strength of about 108 V/m. Analysis of the charging/discharging processes has shown that (1) the effect of the field enhanced secondary emission is negligible in the case of insulators and (2) the effective work function for electron field emission from charged insulators is as low as ≈ 1 eV.
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