Haptic rendering through a dynamic atomic unit approach: toward nonlinear, viscoelastic, anisotropic behavior

Abstract

A cold plasma produced by laser excitation of trapped atoms at very low temperature creates an unusual ionic configuration of Coulomb crystal type before it starts to expand under pressure. A simple model is constructed to describe such a state at the time of plasma formation. The potential of the ions and a threshold shift in the electron energy are estimated. The shift is found to be ΔP≃CP/a, where a is the Wigner–Seitz radius and CP is a universal constant CP≃11±5, all in atomic units. The experimentally observed anomalies in the ion velocity and its dependence on the plasma density at very low temperature have been treated in terms of CP, as vI≃CP/Ma. The effective electron temperature can also be defined as Te≃ΔP/2.