Dust particle coagulation mechanism in low-pressure plasma: rapid growth and saturation stage modeling

Developed polarization-induced ion flow asymmetry (PIFA) mechanism of dust particle coagulation in a low-pressure, low-temperature plasma is used for simulation of experimentally observed coagulation dynamics. The PIFA mechanism provides a new self-consistent description of basic coagulation stages and phenomena: threshold start, rapid growth and saturation phase. The derived analytical expressions for the cross-sections of two negatively charged particle interactions in low-temperature plasma show that coagulation rate coefficients can exceed gas kinetic coefficients by ten times, in agreement with experimental measurements of particle growth rates. Using the PIFA mechanism we have numerically simulated the clustering process for real experimental conditions and studied the effects of plasma parameters on particle size distributions. Calculated results are in good agreement with experimentally observed coagulation trends and peculiarities.