Work

No Evidence of Anomalous Diffusion in Yukawa Crystals

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Diffusion in Yukawa crystals is stochastic due to the thermally activated formation of vacancy-interstitial pairs, which have poor statistics in simulations. This makes it difficult to argue if Yukawa crystals exhibit normal diffusion, or if they could be subdiffusive or superdiffusive. To resolve this, we run a long molecular dynamics simulation of an idealized Yukawa crystal for a billion timesteps. We find no evidence of anomalous diffusion in the pure crystal, but also caution readers against overinterpretting this result as real crystals have complicated structures including grains and defects.

Source: Research Notes of the AAS

DOI: 10.3847/2515-5172/add1d2

Authors: M. E. Caplan, D. Yaacoub

Institution: Illinois State University

Language: English

Topic: Dust and Plasma Wave Phenomena

Subfield: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Field: Physics and Astronomy

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Funders: National Science Foundation, Research Corporation for Science Advancement

Awards: G1287663519, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics