Waves in a Lennard‐Jones Dusty Plasma Liquid

Recently it has been proposed to alter the interaction between dust grains in a plasma by applying ac electric fields to distort the Debye spheres surrounding the grains, which may lead to interaction potentials with a Lennard‐Jones form under certain conditions (e.g., Kompaneets et al., Phys. Plasmas 16 , 043705 (2009)). Motivated by this, we consider the dispersion relations of longitudinal and transverse waves in a dusty plasma liquid where the grains interact via a Lennard‐Jones potential. We use the Quasi‐Localized Charge approximation combined with an analytic expression for the pair distribution function for Lennard‐Jones fluids (Matteoli and Mansoori, J. Chem. Phys. 103 , 4672 (1995)). Possible dusty plasma experimental parameters are considered. (© 2015 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)