Melting of Crystalline Confined Plasmas

Abstract

The melting of cold, ordered arrays of up to 10 000 charges, confined in external fields, has been studied in simulations. The latent heat associated with melting and the behavior of the specific heat were obtained, along with the spatial correlation function g(r) with respect to neighbors and the diffusion rates, both as a function of temperature. The melting temperatures of finite arrays of ions are found to be lower than that for infinite Coulombic matter, by an amount that depends on the number of charges and on the fraction of ions in the surface layer, in particular.