Dusty plasmas

In his pioneering work on plasmas at General Electric in the 1920s, Irving Langmuir noticed clouds of particles trapped in low-pressure argon plasmas created by high-voltage discharges. The particles were formed by the condensation of tungsten evaporated from the discharge cathode. But until the recent practical need to understand dusty plasmas, there have been very few laboratory studies of these plasmas since those of Langmuir.