Structure and Melting of Two-Species Charged Clusters in a Parabolic Trap

Abstract

We consider a system of charged particles interacting with an unscreened Coulomb repulsion in a two-dimensional parabolic confining trap. The static charge on a portion of the particles is twice as large as the charge on the remaining particles. The particles separate into a shell structure with those of greater charge situated farther from the center of the trap. As we vary the ratio of the number of particles of the two species, we find that for certain configurations, the symmetry of the arrangement of the inner cluster of singly-charged particles matches the symmetry of the outer ring of doubly-charged particles. These matching configurations have a higher melting temperature and a higher thermal threshold for intershell rotation between the species than the nonmatching configurations.

arXiv comment4 pages, 6 postscript figures

References in corpus (3)

• Charging Spectrum and Configurations of a Wigner Crystal Island
• Radial fluctuations induced stabilization of the ordered state in two dimensional classical clusters
• Transition Between Ground State and Metastable States in Classical 2D Atoms

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• Finite size effects in the dynamics and thermodynamics of 2D Coulomb clusters
• Shell formation in short like-charged polyelectrolytes in a harmonic trap