Buckling of 2D complex plasma crystals

Complex plasmas (or dusty plasmas) consist of microsized dust particles and a weakly ionized gas and as such they are often regarded as the "plasma state of soft matter". Apart from their particularly strong coupling, such systems exhibit also other surprising properties, such as a non-Hamiltonian behavior, due to the emergent plasma wakes. In this talk I will present some very recent theoretical results about the ways in which the existence of plasma wakes affects the structure of complex plasma crystals under a harmonic confinement. The main focus thereof will be on the buckling transition from a 2D monolayer to bilayer or triple-layer complex plasma crystals, taking place as the confinement frequency is decreased. Such structural transitions provide further insight to the underexplored properties of systems with effective non-reciprocal interactions occuring often in non-equilibrium soft matter.