Shell Structure of Yukawa Balls

Abstract

Abstract Spherical crystals continue to attract increasing interest in many fields, including trapped ions and dusty plasmas. These strongly coupled systems are excellent objects to study fundamental interactions and interesting correlation phenomena while they are relatively easy to realize and observe. Experiments and simulations show a spherical arrangement in nested shells. This work discusses new experimental and simulation results for small systems ( N ≤ 54) as well as the influence of temperature and charge fluctuations on the shell populations. Finally, the cluster configurations are compared with an analytical shell model which is able to predict shell populations and energies for larger clusters. (© 2007 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)