Reentrant transitions in colloidal or dusty plasma bilayers

TL;DR

This paper calculates the phase diagram of colloidal or dusty plasma bilayers with Yukawa interactions, revealing multiple stable structures and reentrant phase transitions, which can be experimentally verified.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive phase diagram for bilayer systems with arbitrary screening lengths and densities, including novel reentrant transition phenomena.

Findings

Multiple stable crystalline structures identified

First-order transition between rhombic phases

Reentrant transitions observed in phase behavior

Abstract

The phase diagram of crystalline bilayers of particles interacting via a Yukawa potential is calculated for arbitrary screening lengths and particle densities. Staggered rectangular, square, rhombic and triangular structures are found to be stable including a first-order transition between two different rhombic structures. For varied screening length at fixed density, one of these rhombic phases exhibits both a single and even a double reentrant transition. Our predictions can be verified experimentally in strongly confined charged colloidal suspensions or dusty plasma bilayers.