Measurement of dust grain charging in a laboratory plasma

Abstract

The authors present an experimental system capable of causing dust grains to interact with a plasma in a well-controlled manner and measuring the accumulated charge. Results indicate that the measured charge accumulated on 0.1 /spl mu/m diameter bismuth particles agrees to the first order with simple charging models. With further refinement of the diagnostic system, it is expected that detailed comparisons can be made with existing models.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>