Structure of Dusty Plasma in External Fields: Simulation and Theory

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
To investigate various structures experimentally observed in dusty plasmas, a Yukawa system in a one-dimensional external field is simulated by molecular dynamics with deformable periodic boundary conditions and constant volume and temperature. At low temperatures, particles are organized into thin layers (sheets) and the number of layers (sheets) changes with the parameters, the whole system being rearranged from nearly equipartitioned layers to other nearly equipartitioned layers. The shell (sheet) model, which has been successful for confined one-component plasmas, is extended to this system and the results of numerical simulations are reproduced accurately. The effect of the cohesive energy in each layer is of essential importance to reproduce discrete changes in the number of sheets.