Self-Organization in Dusty Plasmas

Abstract

Dusty plasma systems as open and highly dissipative media have an inherent tendency to self-organization, resulting in formation of dissipative structures. The presence of a high rate of dissipation provides rapid development of self-organization processes and formation of long lived dissipative structures. These structures should be investigated as single isolated structures to understand their properties which will be alterated in presence of other structures in the system. This chapter analyzes two types of self-organized structures—the dust-plasma sheaths and dust nonlinear drift vortices. It is shown that all properties of the dust-plasma sheath depend on only one parameter—the Mach number of the ion flow, which have allowed zones and can be less than unity, in contrast to the features of the plasma sheath without influence of dust. It is also shown that high rate of dissipation in dusty plasma increases the growth of drift vortices.