Abstract
Abstract An approach is presented to derive a pseudopotential model of interaction between dust particles that simultaneously takes into account the polarization, finite size and screening effects. The consideration starts from the assumption that the dust particles are hard balls made of a conductive material such that their mutual interaction and interaction with the electrons and ions of the buffer plasma can analytically be interpreted within the method of image charges. Then, the renormalization theory of plasma particles interaction, leading to the so‐called generalized Poisson‐Boltzmann equation, is applied to obtain the interaction potential of two isolated dust grains immersed into the buffer plasma of electrons and ions. After that the Ornstein‐Zernike relation in the hyper‐netted chain approximation (HNC) is numerically solved to study the radial distribution function and the static structure factor of the dust grains. In doing so the system of hard balls is actually replaced by a system of point‐like charges with properly adjusted number density in the form of van der Waals correction. A straightforward comparison is made with the Monte‐Carlo simulation to find a fairly good agreement for the radial distribution function at relatively high dust couplings. (© 2015 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)