Transport properties of disordered 2D complex plasma crystal

TL;DR

This study numerically investigates the transport properties of a 2D complex plasma crystal, revealing two types of wave transport and employing a spectral approach to analyze the system's dynamics and excitations.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel spectral method combined with simulations to analyze wave transport in 2D plasma crystals, highlighting the role of plasma environment interactions.

Findings

Identification of Anderson-type delocalization and long-distance excitation.

Spectral approach effectively evaluates transport contributions.

Observation of long-distance lattice excitation due to plasma interactions.

Abstract

In this work, we investigate numerically the transport properties of a 2D complex plasma crystal using diffusion of coplanar dust lattice waves. In the limit where the Hamiltonian interactions can be decoupled from the non-Hamiltonian effects, we identify two distinct types of wave transport: Anderson-type delocalization and long-distance excitation. We use a recently-developed spectral approach to evaluate the contribution of the Anderson problem and compare it to the results of the simulation. The benefit of our approach to transport problems is twofold. First, we employ a highly tunable macroscopic hexagonal crystal, which exhibits many-body interactions and allows for the investigation of transport properties at the kinetic level. Second, the analysis of the transport problem in 2D is provided using an innovative spectral approach, which avoids the use of scaling and boundary conditions. Thus, the combination of theoretical calculation with simulation results allows for the study of important characteristics of this open system. The major deviation between the predicted and observed wave dynamics is a long-distance lattice excitation, which occurs even when the initial perturbation does not spread from the center to the exterior of the crystal. In the decoupled Hamiltonian regime, this effect can be contributed to the dust lattice interaction with the plasma environment.