Studies of force field effects on thermal conductivity of complex plasmas

Abstract

The plasma thermal conductivity of three-dimensional (3D) strongly coupled Yukawa fluids (SCYFs) has been investigated under the influence of varying external force fields through the recently improved homogenous nonequilibrium molecular dynamics (MD) approach. The effects of external field strength (F*) have been calculated along with various combinations of plasma coupling (Γ) and screening parameter (κ) on the plasma thermal conductivity of SCYFs using homogenous nonequilibrium MD (HNEMD) simulations. New investigations show that the plasma thermal conductivity of complex plasmas decreases with an increase of external force field strength and plasma coupling (Γ). Our calculations show that the decreasing behavior is noted for plasma thermal conductivity with increasing screening parameter and system size. The HNEMD simulation results under different force field strengths are in satisfactory agreement with previous numerical results of nonequilibrium MD and equilibrium MD simulations and with reference data points and it showed that the deviations are within less than ±20% for the presented results. It has been shown that our numerical results extended the range of external force field strength up to 0.001 ≤ F* ≤ 0.1 exercised in the previous work in order to establish the size of the linear regimes and to clarify the nature of linearity of 3D SCYFs.