Ring structural transitions in strongly coupled dusty plasmas

Abstract

This paper presents a numerical study of ring structural transitions in strongly coupled dusty plasma confined in a ring-shaped (quartic) potential well with a central barrier, whose axis of symmetry is parallel to the gravitational attraction. It is observed that increasing the amplitude of the potential leads to a transition from a ring monolayer structure (rings of different diameters nested within the same plane) to a cylindrical shell structure (rings of similar diameter aligned in parallel planes). In the cylindrical shell state, the rings alignment in the vertical plane exhibits hexagonal symmetry. The ring transition is reversible, but exhibits hysteresis in the initial and final particle positions. As the critical conditions for the transitions are approached, the transitional structure states exhibit zigzag instabilities or asymmetries on the ring alignment. Furthermore, for a fixed amplitude of the quartic potential that results in a cylinder-shaped shell structure, we show that additional rings in the cylindrical shell structure can be formed by decreasing the curvature of the parabolic potential well, whose axis of symmetry is perpendicular to the gravitational force, increasing the number density, and lowering the screening parameter. Finally, we discuss the application of these findings to dusty plasma experiments with ring electrodes and weak magnetic fields.

References in corpus (14)

• Experimental demonstration of a dusty plasma ratchet rectification and its reversal
• Helical Structures in Vertically Aligned Dust Particle Chains in a Complex Plasma
• Self-diffusion in two-dimensional quasi-magnetized rotating dusty plasmas
• Dimensional phase transitions in small Yukawa clusters
• 3-Dimensional Dusty Plasma in a Strong Magnetic Field: Observation of Rotating Dust Tori
• Visco-elastic fluid simulations of coherent structures in strongly coupled dusty plasma medium
• Structural phase transitions and out-of-plane dust lattice instabilities in vertically confined plasma crystals
• Manifestion of structural Higgs and Goldstone modes in the hexagonal manganites
• Rotating vortices in two-dimensional inhomogeneous strongly coupled dusty plasmas: shear and spiral-density waves
• Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in strongly coupled dusty plasma with rotational shear flows and tracer transport
• A numerical study of gravity driven instability in strongly coupled dusty plasmas.Part I: Rayleigh-Taylor instability and Buoyancy-driven instability
• Fractional Laplacian Spectral Approach to Turbulence in a Dusty Plasma Monolayer
• Transport properties of disordered 2D complex plasma crystal
• Sub and super-luminar propagation of structures satisfying Poynting like theorem for incompressible GHD fluid model depicting strongly coupled dusty plasma medium

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Comparing growth of titania and carbonaceous dusty nanoparticles in weakly magnetised capacitively coupled plasmas
• A review on the Vortex and Coherent Structures in Dusty Plasma Medium