Equilibrium probability distribution of a conductive sphere's floating charge in a collisionless, drifting Maxwellian plasma
arXiv:1305.5763 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.88.023110
Abstract
A dust grain in a plasma has a fluctuating electric charge, and past work concludes that spherical grains in a stationary, collisionless plasma have an essentially Gaussian charge probability distribution. This paper extends that work to flowing plasmas and arbitrarily large spheres, deriving analytic charge probability distributions up to normalizing constants. We find that these distributions also have good Gaussian approximations, with analytic expressions for their mean and variance.
10 pages & 6 figures. v3 corrects two typos in published version (missing slash added in denom. of eq. 66 and, on the same page, an order-of estimate's fixed to O(1/α))