Screened Coulomb potential in a flowing magnetized plasma

Abstract

The electrostatic potential of a moving dust grain in a complex plasma with\nmagnetized ions is computed using linear response theory, thereby extending our\nprevious work for unmagnetized plasmas [P. Ludwig et al., New J. Phys. 14,\n053016 (2012)]. In addition to the magnetic field, our approach accounts for a\nfinite ion temperature as well as ion-neutral collisions. Our recently\nintroduced code \\texttt{Kielstream} is used for an efficient calculation of the\ndust potential. Increasing the magnetization of the ions, we find that the\nshape of the potential crucially depends on the Mach number $M$. In the regime\nof subsonic ion flow ($M<1$), a strong magnetization gives rise to a potential\ndistribution that is qualitatively different from the unmagnetized limit, while\nfor $M>1$ the magnetic field effectively suppresses the plasma wakefield.\n