Crystalline multilayers of the confined Yukawa system

Abstract

PACS 64.70.K- – Solid-solid transitions Abstract – The phase diagram of Yukawa particles confined between two parallel hard walls is calculated at zero temperature beyond the bilayer regime by lattice-sum-minimization. Tuning the screening, a rich phase behavior is found in the regime bounded by stable two triangular layers and three square layers. In this regime, alternating prism phases with square and triangular basis, structures derived from a hcp bulk lattice, and a structure with two outer layers and two inner staggered rectangular layers, reminiscent of a Belgian waffle iron, are stable. These structures are verifiable in experiments on charged colloidal suspensions and dusty plasma sheets. Copyright c © EPLA, 2009 If a system is confined to a thin slit geometry, its prop-erties are drastically altered with respect to the bulk [1,2]. In particular, the freezing transition in confined geome-try occurs into multilayered crystals whose structure is dictated by an interplay of the interparticle interaction and the confining potential [3–5]. For hard spheres between