Frontiers in Dusty Plasmas (PDF)

The study of dusty plasmas is now in a vigorous state of development. Dust and plasma coexist in a vast variety of cosmic environments and their research received a major boost in the early 80's with the Voyager spacecraft observations of peculiar features in the Saturnian ring system (e.g. the radial spokes) which could not be explained purely in gravitational terms. In addition, dust streams were measured by the Galileo spacecraft in the Jovian magnetosphere and charged dust in the earth's mesosphere was detected by a direct rocket experiment. Since then the area has greatly expanded with dedicated laboratory experiments verifying aspects of basic physics of charged dust grains in plasmas.
These proceedings contain invited and poster papers which were presented by scientists active in the field from more than twenty countries. The material contains new aspects of collective interactions in dusty plasmas. For example, discoveries of dust-acoustic Mach cones, dust ion-acoustic shocks, great dust voids, vortex formation, dust crystallization under microgravity, coexistence of positive negative dust grains in the mesosphere and dust in tokamaks. The more theoretical and simulation studies focus on dynamical and structural properties and kinetic theories of strongly coupled dusty plasmas, as well as on self-organizations and structures, in addition to identifying forces (viz. wakefields, electrostatic and dipolar interactions etc.), which are responsible for charged dust grain attraction and phase transitions. The resulting book is a valuable, state-of-the-art review of the field of dusty plasma physics and will be welcomed by both researchers and graduate students who want to keep up to date in this rapidly growing field.