ABSTRACT
About 70 years ago Tonks and Langmuir (1929) first coined the term ‘plasma’ to describe the inner region (remote from the boundaries) of a glowing ionized gas produced by means of an electric discharge in a tube. The term plasma represents a macroscopically neutral gas containing many interacting charged particles (electrons and ions) and neutrals. It is likely that 99% of the matter in our universe (in which the dust is one of the omnipresent ingredients) is in the form of a plasma. Thus, in most cases a plasma coexists with the dust particulates. These particulates may be as large as a micron. They are not neutral, but are charged either negatively or positively depending on their surrounding plasma environments. An admixture of such charged dust or macro-particles, electrons, ions and neutrals forms a ‘dusty plasma’.
