Various regimes of Brownian motion of interacting (charged) dust particles in a plasma have been experimentally studied. A new analytical model for the correct description of the mass transfer...

Conditions for the formation of chain structures of charged grains confined in the gravitational field by external electric fields are studied analytically and numerically. The relationships between the parameters of the pair interaction potential, the number of grains, and the electric field gradient in the trap are found. A criterion for the violation of stable equilibrium in a quasi-one-dimensional chain of grains and the formation of a new configuration in the system is proposed.

Solid-liquid phase transitions in three-dimensional (3D) and two-dimensional (2D) Yukawa systems were studied numerically and analytically, including the melting of the fcc and bcc 3D lattices, and of a hexagonal primitive (hp) 2D lattice. An approach is proposed for the determination of the melting lines in these systems. The suggested approach takes into account the nonlinearity (anharmonicity) of pair interaction forces and allows one to correctly predict the conditions of melting for 3D and 2D crystal systems. The obtained results are compared with the existing theoretical and numerical data.

We analyze the experimental data on the motion of active Brownian micrograins in RF discharge plasmas. In the experiments, two types of microparticles were used: first—plastic grains fully covered with metal, and second—Janus particles with a thin metal cap. We have tracked the trajectories of the separate grains and plotted the pair correlation functions of the observed structures. To examine the motion of the grains, we studied the dependencies of the MFPT dynamic entropy on the coarsening parameter, the fractal dimension of the system on its mean kinetic temperature, and the mean localization area of the grain on its mean kinetic temperature. Based on the obtained results, we conclude that the character of motion of our active Brownian systems changes as the power of an illuminating laser (and, therefore, the mean kinetic temperature of the grains) increases. Janus particles change their trajectories from more chaotic to spiral-like ones; in the case of fully covered particles, we observe the dynamical phase transition from the more ordered structure to the less ordered one.

In present work, phase transitions in strongly-coupled two-dimensional dissipative Yukawa systems are studied. The thermodynamic characteristics of these systems are calculated, namely the internal energy, the specific heat and the entropy. The considered characteristics have two singular points; one of these points corresponds to the first-order phase transition from crystal to the hexatic phase, and another point corresponds to the second-order phase transition from the hexatic phase to the isotropic liquid. The dependence of the position of the melting lines and the range of existence of the hexatic phase on the concentration of the grains in the considered system is studied. The special attention is paid to the comparison of our results to the existing numerical and analytical data.