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About 15 years ago, Rao, Shukla, and Yu1 theoretically predicted the existence of the dust acoustic wave (DAW) in a multicomponent electron-ion-dust plasma. In the DAW the restoring force comes from the pressures of the inertialess electrons and ions, while the dust mass provides the inertia to maintain the wave. The DAW has been observed in many low-temperature laboratory experiments. 2–5 An up-to-date knowledge of linear and nonlinear dust acoustic waves is contained in Ref. 6.

However, when a dusty plasma is cooled to an extremely low temperature the de Broglie wavelength of the charge carriers could be comparable to the dimension of the systems. In a such a situation, ultracold dusty plasma behaves like a Fermi gas and quantum mechanical effects are expected to play a central role in the behavior of charged particles. The importance of quantum mechanical effects in microelectronic devices, 7 in dense astrophysical systems8 and in laser plasmas9 has been recognized. Microelectronics and ultraintegrated devices are usually contaminated by the presence of highly charged dust carriers. Accordingly, in this short paper, we discuss the property of the dust acoustic wave in a quantum plasma composed of electrons, ions, and charged dust particulates.