Response to “Comment on ‘Instabilities of self-gravitating dusty clouds in magnetized plasmas’ ” [Phys. Plasmas 8, 1087 (2001)

Abstract

We have critically evaluated the Comment by Ciolek and found that it neither criticizes our work nor adds more to the physics/understanding of the Jeans instability in partially ionized, self-gravitating magnetized dusty plasma. It merely contains a summary of the authors’ previously published results, which are not pertinent to our work. In the following, we present a summary of our paper and contrast our work with those of Ciolek and co-workers. Let us first critically examine the works of Ciolek and co-workers mentioned in the Comment. We found that in one of their works ~which, according to Ciolek and us, is the closest to ours!, Ciolek and Mouschovias considered a multicomponent plasma containing the inertialess dust grains, the electrons, the ions, and the neutrals, and examined the effects of the dust grains on the self-initiated formation and contraction of cloud cores due to the ambipolar diffusion in a magnetic molecular cloud. On the other hand, we have considered a nonuniform self-gravitating dusty magnetoplasma composed of the electrons, the ions, the neutrals, and the massive ~in comparison with the electron, ion, and neutral masses! and negatively charged dust grains whose mass density is much larger than that of the ions or the neutral atoms, and have investigated the instability of dustassociated electromagnetic waves in our dusty plasma system. The other major points in which our dusty plasma model differs from the multicomponent plasma model of Ciolek and Mouschovias are as follows.