ABSTRACT
The theory of dust particle oscillations in the plasma sheath is presented, taking into account particle charging kinetics and neutral gas friction. Effects of "regular" and stochastic charge variations are considered. It is shown that whilst regular variations generally enhance the damping of horizontally propagating dust lattice waves, they can also cause an instability in the vertical oscillations of single particles. The stochastic charge variations, if sufficiently strong, result in exponential growth of the mean energy of both types of oscillations.
ABSTRACT
Observations show that plasma crystals, suspended in the sheath of a radio-frequency discharge, rotate under the influence of a vertical magnetic field. Depending on the discharge conditions, two different cases are observed: a rigid-body rotation (all the particles move with a constant angular velocity) and sheared rotation (the angular velocity of particles has a radial distribution). When the discharge voltage is increased sufficiently, the particles may even reverse their direction of motion. A simple analytical model is used to explain qualitatively the mechanism of the observed particle motion and its dependence on the confining potential and discharge conditions. The model takes into account electrostatic, ion drag, neutral drag, and effective interparticle interaction forces. For the special case of rigid-body rotation, the confining potential is reconstructed. Using data for the radial dependence of particle rotation velocity, the shear stresses are estimated. The critical shear stress at which shear-induced melting occurs is used to roughly estimate the shear elastic modulus of the plasma crystal. The latter is also used to estimate the viscosity contribution due to elasticity in the plasma liquid. Further development is suggested in order to quantitatively implement these ideas.
