An overview is given of the confinement and dynamical phenomena observed in experiments and simulations of magnetized dust tori. Due to the presence of gravity, a strongly inhomogeneous velocity field is found along the circumference of the torus. The simulations show that the dust flow, which is unsheared and nearly incompressible, exhibits a distinct shell structure, which can be understood by rapid frictional cooling and strong Coulomb coupling. At lower frictional damping, the symmetry of the flow can be spontaneously broken, leading to a region of strong velocity shear and excitation of Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities. New experimental evidence of counterflows is found.
The inhomogeneous flow of strongly coupled dust particles in a toroidal particle trap with harmonic radial confinement is analyzed in the incompressible fluid limit. It is shown that the flow can spontaneously generate shock-like events, which are similar to the hydraulic jump in open channel flows. A definition of the Froude number for this model is given and the critical speed is recovered as the group velocity of surface waves. This hydraulic model is compared with molecular-dynamics simulations, which show that a sudden bifurcation of the flow lines and a localized temperature peak appear just at the point where the critical condition for the hydraulic jump is located.
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