Modulational instability of a Yukawa fluid excitation under the Quasi-localization charged approximation (QLCA) framework

TL;DR

This study analyzes the modulational instability in strongly coupled Yukawa fluids using the QLCA framework, revealing stability conditions and the influence of temperature and dimensionality on macroscopic structure formation.

Contribution

It provides a novel QLCA-based analysis of modulational instability in quasicrystalline phases of strongly coupled systems, highlighting stability regimes and effects of temperature and dimensionality.

Findings

System stable for wavelengths beyond a critical screening parameter

Unstable region grows with increasing dust temperature

2D and 3D systems are more stable than 1D chains

Abstract

Collective response dynamics of a strongly coupled system departs from the continuum phase upon transition to the quasicrystalline phase, or formation of a Wigner lattice. The wave nonlinearity leading to the modulational instability in recent studies, for example, of a quasicrystalline dusty plasma lattice, predicts inevitable emergence of macroscopic structures from mesoscopic carrier fluctuations. The modulational instability in the quasi crystalline or amorphous phase of a strongly coupled system, uniquely accessed under the quasi-localized charge approximation (QLCA), generates a narrower instability regime for entire spectral range. In comparison to the linear one dimensional chains of strongly coupled dust grains, the longitudinal modes for quasicrystalline phase show finite distinction in terms of the instability regime. The present QLCA based analysis shows system to be stable for arbitrarily long wavelength of perturbation for full range of screening parameter $\kappa=a/\lambda_{\rm D}$ beyond the value $\kappa=0.182$, where $a$ is the inter dust separation and $\lambda_{\rm D}$ is the plasma Debye length. However, this unstable region continuously grows with increase in the dust temperature which invoke the weak coupling effects. The present results show that as compared to the one dimensional chains, the more practical 2D and 3D strongly coupled systems are potentially stable with respect to the macroscopic amplitude modulations. The development of macroscopic structures from the mesoscopic fluctuations is therefore predicted to be rather restricted for strongly coupled systems with implications for systems where strongly coupled species are in a quasi-localized (semi-solid) phase.