Debye Shielding and Particle Correlations in Strongly Coupled Dusty Plasmas

A particle-in-cell simulation method is shown effective in modeling strongly coupled plasmas, exhibiting good energy conservation properties and good resolution of the dust-particle interaction. For coupling parameters of order unity, the simulation dust particles exhibit Debye shielding on the spatial scale of the dust Debye length. When initialized with a large coupling parameter, the dust particles do not organize themselves into a crystalline structure as expected, but instead are scattered by the presence of substantial electrostatic wave activity. Liquid-like or crystal-like correlations among the dust particles occur only when annealing is imposed. {copyright} {ital 1997} {ital The American Physical Society}