Modeling Fine-Particle (Dusty) Plasmas and Charge-Stabilized Colloidal Suspensions as Inhomogeneous Yukawa Systems

As a basis for the structure and correlation analyses of fine-particle (dusty) plasmas and colloidal suspensions, the thermodynamic treatment of mixtures of macro- and microscopic charged particles is revisited and extended to finite systems with weak inhomogeneity within the adiabatic response of microscopic particles. The effective potential for macroscopic particles is shown to be composed of mutual Yukawa repulsions and a confining (attractive) Yukawa potential from their "shadow" (the average charge density of macroscopic particles with an inverted sign). Clarified is the relationship between two different approaches hitherto taken, the assumption of a parabolic one-body potential or of the flat one-body potential of finite extension. The enhanced charge neutrality due to the existence of macroscopic particles seems to suggest that the latter is closer to reality.