Publication at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics |
2012
Abstract
Dust grains are bombarded by hot electrons in various space and terrestrial plasmas. Primary electrons can release low-energy secondary electrons and/or they can be scattered prior being completely slowed-down inside a grain.
For convex grains, the secondary and scattered yields of omnidirectional primary electrons do not depend on a grain shape unless the primary electron penetration depth is comparable with the grain size. For glassy grains, the shape effect becomes negligible for grains larger than 1μm and 30μm when irradiated by 1keV and 10keV primary electrons, respectively.
In this paper, we utilize our numerical model of secondary electron emission from small dust grains to study local yield variations across grain surfaces.