We investigate particle-wave microdynamics in the large amplitude self-excited dust acoustic wave at the discrete level through direct visualization. The wave field induces dust oscillations which in turn sustain wave propagation. In the regular wave with increasing wave amplitude, dust-wave interaction with uncertain temporary crest trapping and dust-dust interaction lead to the transition from cyclic to disordered dust motion associated with the liquid to the gas transition, and anisotropic non-Gaussian heating. In the irregular wave, particle trough-trapping is also observed, and the heating is nearly Gaussian and less anisotropic.

Down to the discrete microscopic level, the liquid is neither homogeneous nor completely disordered. The interplay of mutual coupling and thermal agitation makes the system support short range structural order, and avalanche-type cooperative hopping excitations which lead to structural arrangement. The rich dynamical behaviors of spatio-temporal heterogeneities are still poorly understood because of the lack of proper tools for direct visualization. The dusty plasma liquid can be self-organized by negatively charged micrometer sized dusts suspending in a low-pressure rf discharge background. Its sub-mm inter-particle distance and the tens of second thermal relaxation time make it a proper system to mimic and understand the generic spatio-temporal behaviors of the liquid at the discrete kinetic level through direct optical video-microscopy. In this paper, we briefly review the recent studies on the dynamical heterogeneities of the cold 2D dusty plasma liquids at the discrete level. The effects of mutual interaction, thermal agitation, external shear, and tight confinement on micro-motion, anomalous diffusion, avalanche-type excitations of hopping clusters and defect clusters, structural ordering and rearrangement, and visco-elastic responses are presented and discussed.

The spatiotemporal evolutions of microstructure and motion in the transient relaxation toward the steady supercooled liquid state after quenching a dusty plasma Wigner liquid, formed by charged dust particles suspended in a low pressure discharge, are experimentally investigated through direct optical microscopy. It is found that the quenched liquid slowly evolves to a colder state with more heterogeneities in structure and motion. Hopping particles and defects appear in the form of clusters with multiscale cluster size distributions. Via the structure rearrangement induced by the reduced thermal agitation from the cold thermal bath after quenching, the temporarily stored strain energy can be cascaded through the network to different newly distorted regions and dissipated after transferring to nonlinearly coupled motions with different scales. It leads to the observed self-similar multiscale slowing down relaxation with power law increases of structural order and structural relaxation time, the similar power law decreases of particle motions at different time scales, and the stronger and slower fluctuations with increasing waiting time toward the new steady state.

We experimentally investigate the multitime scale diffusion and the spatiotemporal behaviors of the degrees of enhancement for the longitudinal and the transverse diffusions in a confined mesoscopic quasi-two-dimensional dusty-plasma liquid sheared by two parallel counterpropagating laser beams. The steady external drive directly enhances the longitudinal cooperative hopping, associated with the shear bands that have high shear rate near boundaries. It drastically excites the slow hopping modes to high fluctuation level in the outer band region, accompanied by the enhanced superdiffusion. Through cascaded many-body interaction, the excitation flows from the outer region toward the center region, from the longitudinal modes to the transverse mode, and from the slow hopping modes to the fast caging modes, which are in better contact with the thermal bath. It causes the weaker enhancement of fluctuation level, and diffusion for the center region and the fast modes. The boundary confinement further breaks the system symmetry and enhances anisotropy. It has much stronger effect on the suppression of the transverse hopping modes than the longitudinal hopping mode. The degrees of enhancement of the fluctuations by the shear stress are highly anisotropic for the large amplitude slow modes, especially in the outer region but are more isotropic in the inner band.

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