- #1
Sharkey4123
- 8
- 0
The debye length is the effective length over which electrostatic potential disturbances are "screened out" in a plasma.
So if I drop a charged point particle in a plasma, then I expect after some Debye Length, D, from this point charge, I can see no difference between any other point in the plasma.
Now, if I were to increase the charge of that particle and drop it in the plasma again, would the Debye length still be the same as before? Even if I considered this new charged particle to have any arbitrarily large charge?
Surely, the electrostatic potential created by this new charge would be much larger than the previous case, and thus "extend" further, taking "more" of the plasma to screen it out, hence a larger Debye Length. Is this correct?
So if I drop a charged point particle in a plasma, then I expect after some Debye Length, D, from this point charge, I can see no difference between any other point in the plasma.
Now, if I were to increase the charge of that particle and drop it in the plasma again, would the Debye length still be the same as before? Even if I considered this new charged particle to have any arbitrarily large charge?
Surely, the electrostatic potential created by this new charge would be much larger than the previous case, and thus "extend" further, taking "more" of the plasma to screen it out, hence a larger Debye Length. Is this correct?