MF Microspheres: Helping or Puzzling Tool?

Melamine formaldehyde microspheres are widely used in dusty plasma experiments for their monodispersity, sphericity, low mass density, and well defined sizes. This paper summarizes problems that were encountered in numerous applications of these grains in different laboratory simulations. and the already published results are discussed in view of new experiments. The main results of this paper are connected with changes of the grain mass due to the decreased pressure and/or increased temperature and variations of the grain dimensions, its shape, and mass density under electron or ion bombardments. By contrast to the work function estimated from field emission properties, we have found the photoelectric work function (4.5 eV) being close to that expected. A sputtering of the grains using a 30-keV ion beam revealed their unexpected heterogeneity.