Basic Properties of Complex Plasmas

Plasmas have been systematically investigated in laboratories since the beginning of the 20th century. For most of that time, the presence of dust in a plasma was merely seen as a contamination effect, and dusty plasmas were interesting mainly for astrophysicists who developed early theories for the dust charging, interaction, transport, and other processes occurring in cometary and planetary atmospheres, interstellar matter, planet formation, etc. (Grün et al., 1984; Goertz, 1992; Hartquist et al., 1992). In the late 1980s, laboratory research on dusty plasmas became important for industry, e.g., for the fabrication of microelectronics using plasma processes, where dust particles grew during the manufacture process (Selwyn et al., 1989; Bouchoule, 1999)…