Interaction of charged particle beams with dust grains

The thesis concentrates on several aspects of processes leading to the dust charging by monoenergetic electron and ion beams. Two main topics are discussed in the thesis, including development of new methods for data processing and their application to the study of secondary electron emission (SEE) and determination of the energy distribution of emitted electrons, and the investigation of ion field emission (field evaporation), both processes from dust grains of different materials. The charge on the grains changes rapidly when they pass through different plasma environments, thus it depends on the physical and electrical properties of the grains, on the nature of their interaction with the surrounding radiation and plasma fields, and on the relative velocity. The main attention in the thesis was paid to an ion field emission process. The difference between both distributions found for metallic materials is connected either with irregular shapes of zinc grains or with a thin layer of oxides.