Abstract
Of interest in modern plasma physics are investigations of dusty plasmas encountered in a variety of experiments, applications and natural phenomena as well. Dust grains are known to form a crystalline structure that poses a question of how attractive forces are generated in a particular dusty plasma. In this paper, a new model of intergrain interaction is proposed. In most works on dusty plasmas, the plasma medium itself is considered to be in an ideal state of matter when the interaction between particles, i.e., electrons and ions, is negligible. Herein this assumption is not implied and, thus, the density–response formalism with the local-field correction is used to account for the plasma screening in the longitudinal dielectric function. Then, a new model of intergrain interaction is defined and it is shown that a molecule-like potential with an energy well appears. Such a model might be appropriate for cryogenic dusty plasma experiments recently reported.