Screened Coulomb potential in a flowing magnetized plasma

Joost, J. P. and Ludwig, P. and Kählert, H. and Arran, C. and Bonitz, M. (2015) Screened Coulomb potential in a flowing magnetized plasma. Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, 57 (2): 025004. ISSN 0741-3335

Abstract

The electrostatic potential of a moving dust grain in a complex plasma with magnetized ions is computed using linear response theory, thereby extending our previous work for unmagnetized plasmas (Ludwig et al 2012 New J. Phys. 14 053016). In addition to the magnetic field, our approach accounts for a finite ion temperature as well as ion-neutral collisions. Our recently introduced code Kielstream is used for an efficient calculation of the dust potential. Increasing the magnetization of the ions, we find that the shape of the potential crucially depends on the Mach number M. In the regime of subsonic ion flow (M < 1), a strong magnetization gives rise to a potential distribution that is qualitatively different from the unmagnetized limit, while for M > 1 the magnetic field effectively suppresses the plasma wakefield.