In a laboratory, a two-dimensional complex (dusty) plasma consists of a low-density ionized gas containing a confined suspension of Yukawa-coupled plastic microspheres. For an initial crystal-like form, we report ideal gas behavior in this strongly coupled system during shock-wave experiments. This evidence supports the use of the ideal gas law as the equation of state for soft crystals such as...

Spherically confined dust crystals have recently attracted large attention, see e.g. [1] and [2] for an overview. After the exploration of the ground state structure [3, 4, 5, 6] and of metastable states and their probability [7, 8, 9] a question of particular interest is the dynamical excitation spectrum. The normal modes are a key property describing the response of a finite system to externa...

Free convection effects and heat transfer due to a pulsating point heat source embedded in an infinite, fluid saturated, porous dusty medium are studied analytically. Both velocity and temperature fields are discussed in the form of series expansions in the Rayleigh number, for both the fluid and particle phases based on the mean heat generation rate from source and on the permeability of the p...

[1] Saturn’s rings, terrestrial polar mesospheric clouds, and astrophysical molecular clouds are all dusty plasma environments where tiny grains of water ice are an important constituent. Existing models typically assume that the ice grains are spherical and then invoke various arguments about the normal distribution or the power law dependence of grain number density on grain radius. Using a l...

The dispersion properties and excitation mechanisms of ‘dipole oscillons’ in a dusty plasma containing charged elongated rod-like dust grains are investigated in the presence of streaming plasma particles for cases without and with an external static magnetic field. In a magnetized dusty plasma, a new ‘oscillon-ion lower-hybrid’ mode is found, which can be excited by the equilibrium energy of c...

The evolutions of the material interpenetration boundary induced by Rayleigh-Taylor instability were calculated under various acceleration histories using a buoyancy-drag model. It reveals that the development of mixing under constant acceleration is very different from that under variable acceleration. The calculation results were compared with detailed experimental data to prove the validatio...

Supernovae (SNe) exploding inside dusty regions could dominate, even by a large amount, the number of core-collapse events in the universe, as most of the starforming activity is hidden by dust. Nevertheless, centuries of optical searches have discovered only very few SNe in dusty regions and no very obscured event. This is clearly a selection effect, and infrared or radio observations are need...

We theoretically investigate conditions for the refraction of long-wavelength dust acoustic waves by arrays of periodic cylinders in a dusty plasma. This is based on a recent analysis of the refraction of shallow water waves by periodic cylinder arrays (Hu and Chan, Phys. Rev. Lett. 95 (2005), 154501). In the dusty plasma case, however, the boundary conditions involve the formation of voids aro...

Observations made usingCOBE, SCUBA, ISO and MAMBO have provided a reasonable working knowledge of both the intensity of the submm and far-infrared background radiation and the source counts of luminous high-redshift dusty galaxies. However, because there are uncertainties in the background intensity determinations, the samples of detected galaxies are small, and most importantly, their redshift...