English

Dust vortex flow analysis in weakly magnetized plasma

Plasma Physics 2020-06-30 v1

Abstract

Analysis of driven dust vortex flow is presented in a weakly magnetized plasma. The 2D hydrodynamic model is applied to the confined dust cloud in a non-uniform magnetic field in order to recover the dust vortex flow driven in a conservative force field setup, in absence of any non-conservative fields or dust charge variation. Although the time independent electric and magnetic fields included in the analysis provide conservative forcing mechanisms, when the a drift based mechanism, recently observed in a dusty plasma experiment by [M. Puttscher and A. Melzer, Physics of Plasmas, 21,123704(2014)] is considered, the dust vortex flow solutions are shown to be recovered. We have examined the case where purely ambipolar electric field, generated by polarization produced by electron E*B drift, drives the dust flow. A sheared E*B drift flow is facilitated by the magnetic field gradient, driving the vortex flow in the absence of ion drag. The analytical stream-function solutions have been analyzed with varying magnetic field strength, its gradient and kinematic viscosity of the dust fluid. The effect of B field gradient is analyzed which contrasts that of E field gradient present in the plasma sheath.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2006.02220,
  title  = {Dust vortex flow analysis in weakly magnetized plasma},
  author = {Prince Kumar and Devendra Sharma},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.02220},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

8 pages , 10 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:01:32.081Z