Role of dust on the gradient driven instability in an E×B plasma.

The E×B plasma systems play an important role in the technologies like electric space propulsion and magnetized plasma sources used in plasma material interaction/surface processing. However, due to the gradient in plasma density, collisions and external fields such systems become prone to the instabilities and also dust particles are generated during the plasma processing. Hence, this article discusses the growth of gradient driven instability in a cross-field plasma, where both the ions and the electrons are magnetized and dust particles also exist. Using the fluid approach, we write basic equations and then derive an equation in terms of perturbed potential. The unperturbed part of this equation leads to the dispersion equation which is solved numerically for obtaining the growth rate of the instability. The normalized form of the growth rate is investigated in greater detail under the effect of dust density, dust mass, dust temperature, external magnetic field, ion temperature and ion temperature gradient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]