Coupling of dust particles in a weakly collisional plasma with an ion flow

We investigate the coupling of dust particles into self-confined vertical pairs in a weakly collisional plasma with a directed ion flow. We neglect by the horizontal external confinement and assume that the lateral confinement of the lower particle is provided by the horizontal wake field, while the vertical confinement of both particles is due to the sheath field. The conditions to predict the development of dissipative instability in a self-confined particle pair are obtained depending on the Mach number, the plasma screening parameter, the particle charge ratio, and the normalized particle mass.