Keywords
Abstract
Screened electrostatic and van der Waals interactions of nano- and micron-sized particles in dusty plasma were considered. The electrostatic interaction is considered on the basis of the linearized Poisson-Boltzmann equation for particles both with fixed charges uniformly distributed over their surfaces and with fixed surface electric potentials. The found solution of the problem makes it possible to study the interaction of both particles of comparable radius and particles of very different sizes. The interaction force takes into account the osmotic component, which in the case of constant charges leads to the restoration of the equality of the forces acting on the first and second particles. For the van der Waals interaction, the screening of static fluctuations and the retardation of electromagnetic fields for the dispersive part of the interaction were taken into account. Based on the analysis of various expressions for the geometric factor, taking into account the retardation of the electromagnetic field, a numerically stable method for calculating this factor was proposed. The total energy of interaction of two charged dust particles is calculated for plasma parameters characteristic of dusty plasma: the electron and ion number densities from 108 to 1012 cm-3, the particle radius from 10 nm to 1 μm and the particle charges from 10 to 103 elementary charges per micron of particle radius.