Dusty plasmas: The effect of closely packed grains

A dusty plasma device recently described in the literature has been utilized to study experimentally the charging of dust grains by the surrounding plasma. By varying the ratio d /λ D between the intergrain distance and the plasma Debye length, the effects predicted by Goertz and Ip (1984), and subsequently reanalyzed in a more general fashion by Whipple et al. (1985), when “isolated” dust grains become “closely packed” grains have been demonstrated experimentally.