Fluid approach to evaluate sound velocity in Yukawa systems and complex plasmas.

Abstract

The conventional fluid description of multicomponent plasma, supplemented by an appropriate equation of state for the macroparticle component, is used to evaluate the longitudinal sound velocity of Yukawa fluids. The obtained results are in very good agreement with those obtained earlier employing the quasilocalized charge approximation and molecular dynamics simulations in a rather broad parameter regime. Thus, a simple yet accurate tool to estimate the sound velocity across coupling regimes is proposed, which can be particularly helpful in estimating the dust-acoustic velocity in strongly coupled dusty (complex) plasmas. It is shown that, within the present approach, the sound velocity is completely determined by particle-particle correlations and the neutralizing medium (plasma), apart from providing screening of the Coulomb interaction, has no other effect on the sound propagation. The ratio of the actual sound velocity to its "ideal gas" (weak coupling) scale only weakly depends on the coupling strength in the fluid regime but exhibits a pronounced decrease with the increase of the screening strength. The limitations of the present approach in applications to real complex plasmas are briefly discussed.