Equilibrium probability distribution of a conductive sphere's floating charge in a collisionless, drifting Maxwellian plasma

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 analyt...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2014-01
Main Authors: Thomas, Drew M, Coppins, Michael
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Charge distribution
Collisionless plasmas
Normal distribution
Normalizing (statistics)
Probability distribution
Variation
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1305.5763