Jeans instability in a dusty plasma

By performing a self-consistent hybrid simulation, we study the gravitational instability of charged dust grains in an ambient plasma. In the simulation, the dust particles are treated as super-particles, whose trajectories we time integrate under the influence of the electric and the gravitational fields. The ambient plasma influences the dust particle dynamics through the Debye shielding of the electric potential. We compare the numerical result from that of the linear Jeans instability analysis, and also we show that the condensation of the dust cloud effectively reduces the Jeans criterion threshold, thus accelerates the instability.

Numerical simulation of plasma dust Jeans instability. Shown are the spatial profiles of the density distribution and the electrostatic potential, at a time when the instability has moderately developped.

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