Search

An effective anisotropic potential is proposed for the interaction between dust particles in a gas‐discharge plasma. In addition to the Coulomb repulsion this potential takes into account attraction due to the spatial positive plasma charge originating from focusing of the ionic fluxes by dusty particles. The time evolution of the dust particle kinetic and potential energies from random initial configurations have been investigated by the Brownian dynamics method. Results of our simulation showed that the attraction between dusty particles can be the main physical reason of formation and decay of classical bound dust particle pairs and many particle complexes with low potential energy, while the kinetic energy (temperature) of unbound dust particles and particle oscillating in bound complexes may increase on three order as observed in experiments.