Global dust density in two-dimensional complex plasma

Abstract

The driven-dissipative Langevin dynamics simulation is used to produce a two-dimensional (2D) dense cloud, which is composed of charged dust particles being trapped in a quadratic potential. A 2D mesh grid is built to analyze the center-to-wall dust density. It is found that local dust density in the outer region relative to that of the inner region is more nonuniform, being consistent with the feature of quadratic potential. The dependences of the global dust density on equilibrium temperature, particle size, confinement strength, and confinement shape are investigated. It is found that the particle size, the confinement strength, and the confinement shape strongly affect the global dust density, while the equilibrium temperature plays a minor effect on it. In the direction where there is a stronger confinement, the dust density gradient is bigger.