Equilibrium probability distribution of a conductive sphere's floating charge in a collisionless, drifting Maxwellian plasma
Plasma Physics
2014-01-28 v3
Abstract
A dust grain in a plasma has a fluctuating electric charge, and past work concludes that spherical grains in a stationary, collisionless plasma have an essentially Gaussian charge probability distribution. This paper extends that work to flowing plasmas and arbitrarily large spheres, deriving analytic charge probability distributions up to normalizing constants. We find that these distributions also have good Gaussian approximations, with analytic expressions for their mean and variance.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1305.5763,
title = {Equilibrium probability distribution of a conductive sphere's floating charge in a collisionless, drifting Maxwellian plasma},
author = {Drew M. Thomas and Michael Coppins},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1305.5763},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
10 pages & 6 figures. v3 corrects two typos in published version (missing slash added in denom. of eq. 66 and, on the same page, an order-of estimate's fixed to O(1/{\alpha}))