PHYSICS OF DUSTY PLASMAS

‘7th International Conference on the Physics of Dusty Plasmas’ was held at India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, New Delhi during 6th - 7th March, 2014. This was in continuation series of International Conferences on the Physics of Dusty Plasmas which take place every three years at different locations around the globe (Hakone, Japan 1999; Durban, South Africa 2002; Orleans, France 2005; Azores, Portugal 2008, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany 2011). The present conference provided a unique opportunity for disseminating the present status of Dusty Plasma Physics among participants from developing and industrialized countries.

Dr. Jaya Srivastava, Assistant Professor, Dronacharya Group of Institutions, Greater Noida presented her paper “Propagation of Kinetic Alfven Wave in Dusty Magnetospheric Plasma” in the conference ICPDP 2014 consisted of 7 key notes, 25 invited oral talks, 15 contributory oral talks and 160 poster presentations. The talks and poster session were arranged in 14 sessions over 5 days.

The first session was chaired by Prof. R. Pandit, IISc, Bangalore, India. The event started with the welcome speech by Prof. R. Merlino, Vice- Chancellor, University of Iowa, USA. He delivered a talk on “25 years of Dust Acoustic wave physics”. Prof. R. Bharuthram, Deputy Vice - Chancellor of University of the Western Cape, South Africa, delivered a remarkable talk on “nonlinear structures”. Prof. E. Verheest, Universiteit Gent, Belgium focused on the “Electrostatic nonlinear super solitons in dusty plasma”.

The second session was chaired by Prof. P. K. Kaw, Director of Institute of Plasma Research, India. The first speaker of this session was Prof. A. Mamun, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, a dynamic personality who gave an idea on “Electro-acoustic shock structures in dusty plasma”. Prof. Ya - Yi Tsai, National central University, Taiwan, presented his views on “waveform dynamics of dust acoustic waves”. The last Speaker of the session was Prof. G. Lakhina, Director, Indian Institute of Geomagnetism, India, in his thought-provoking talk, he stressed on “Ion Acoustic solitons”.

The third session, was chaired by Prof. E. Thomas Jr., Auburn University, USA. Prof. H. Thomas, Director of Max Plank Institute for Extra-Terrestrial physics, Germany was first speaker who explored “the recent and future research on complex plasma”. Second speaker was Prof. A. Ivlve, Max Plank Institute for Extra-Terrestrial physics, Germany. He explored the idea of “complex plasma” in excellent manner. Prof. Van de Wetering, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherland, was the last speaker who delivered a talk on “Void dynamics in low pressure plasmas”.

To commemorate the memory of Prof. Padma Shukla, the ICPDP 2014 organized a special session. This session had invited talks followed by a two hour contributed poster session by collaborators, students and post docs. The work covered in the poster was related to the work done by Padma Shukla in the field of dusty/complex plasmas.

The conference came to an end with Awards Presentation Ceremony. Ms. Nitika, Ph.D. Student of IPR, India got “Young Scientist Award” for her best poster presentation.

Dr. Jaya presented her paper “Propagation of kinetic Alfven wave in dusty magnetospheric plasma”. In this paper,expressions were found for the dispersion relation and damping- rate of small-scale Alfven wave in the presence of ion and electron beam in both regimes ((?»1) and (?«1)) in dusty magnetospheric plasma. Kinetic effects of electrons and ions were included to study kinetic Alfven wave because both are important in the transition region. It was found that the ratio ? of electron thermal energy density to magnetic field energy density and the ratio of ion to electron thermal temperature (Ti/Te) affect the dispersion relation and damping-rate of kinetic Alfven wave in both cases (warm and cold electron limit). It has predicted that higher k??i (k??i>1) are more effective for the bi-Maxwellian distribution. The calculated values of frequency were corresponding to the observed values in the range 0.1–4 Hz. The method might be suitable to deal with the PSBL, where particle acceleration is also important along with wave emissions.