Darmstadt 2008 – scientific programme
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P: Fachverband Plasmaphysik
P I: Poster: Staubige Plasmen, Dichte Plasmen
P I.3: Poster
Tuesday, March 11, 2008, 08:30–10:30, Poster C3
Phase transitions in mesoscopic dust clusters — •Henning Baumgartner1, Daniel Asmus1, Volodymyr Golubnychiy2, and Michael Bonitz1 — 1Institute for Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics, University Kiel, Leibnizstr. 15, 24118 Kiel — 2Max Planck Institute for Coal Research
Dust crystals, so called Yukawa balls, are due to their relatively easy observation in experiments a field of great interest and can serve as a model system for strong correlation phenomena. The dust particles under parabolic confinement arrange themselves in a nested shells structure, similar to ions in Paul- and Penningtraps, with specific shell population depending on the system parameters, the total number of particles, the temperature and the screening.
Computer simulations allows one to study the influence of these system parameters on stable configurations not easily performed in experiments. Here we use Molecular dynamics simulations to describe the effect of the screening on the ground state configurations of mesoscopic (N ≤ 60) clusters. The stability of these ground state configurations against finite temperature effects is then analyzed by classical Monte Carlo simulations. The systematic investigation results in an overview of the ground state configurations over a wide range of screening. The phase transitions, which are understood as a qualitative alteration of the cluster structure, are determined by the frequency of occurance of the different ground and metastable states of the systems [1].
[1] H. Baumgartner, D. Asmus, P. Ludwig, V. Golubnychiy and M. Bonitz, to be published