Towards Realistic Simulations of Shocks in 2D Dusty Plasmas

The phenomenon of shocks in 2D dusty plasmas has been a subject of both experimental and simulation studies. The 2D layer of dust particles becomes highly compressed in a layer that propagates at a supersonic speed. While many features of the shock are similar in the experiments and molecular dynamics simulations, there are also significant differences. Phenomena observed in simulations that were never confirmed in experiments include pre-heated particles, oscillatory profiles of the dust number density, and a solid-liquid phase separation in the aftershock region. Conversely, there is a feature seen in the experiments but not in simulations, which is significant out-of-plane particle motion at high densities in the compressed region of the shock, where the dust layer has been observed buckling in experiments. Out-of-plane motion could not be observed in the previous simulations because their particle motion was constrained to a single plane. To improve the fidelity of simulations, we plan new runs that allow out-of-plane motion, limited by a parabolic potential that mimics the vertical confinement of particles in the experiment.