Collisional charging of dust particles by suprathermal particles. I -- Standard anisotropic Kappa distributions

Abstract: We study the effect of the velocity distributions of the plasma particles on the equilibrium charge of dust particles which suffer collisional charging, considering different forms of both isotropic and anisotropic Kappa distributions for ions and electrons. This paper is the first of a series of two papers on this subject. Here, we consider two different forms of Kappa distributions which are widely used in the literature, and show that effects on the dust charge associated to one of these forms are much more significant than the effects associated to the other basic form. The results obtained also show that changes in the electron distribution can have effect on the dust charge which is much more significant than the effect which can be associated to changes in the ion distribution.