Department News

Prof. Kalman's paper recently appeared in Phys. Rev. Letters

March 24, 2008

A paper of Res. Prof. Gabor Kalman and his graduate student John Feldmann has recently appeared in the Feb.29 2008 issue of the Phys. Rev. Letters journal (see paper .pdf). This year is a special year for Physical Review Letters as the journal celebrates its 50th anniversary. This event was widely celebrated at the recent 2008 APS March Meeting in New Orleans, LA.

In their Letter, the BC physicists and their colleagues from the University of California - San Diego and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences develop a theory of the ground state configuration of a system of magnetic dipoles fixed on a two-dimensional lattice. The results of the theoretical analysis were accompanied by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations.  

The authors consider the systems of magnetic dipoles fixed on sites of a given 2D lattice that interact solely via the magnetic dipole-dipole potential. Secondly, they address a scenario in a complex plasma, where the magnetic interaction competes with the dominant screened electrostatic Yukawa interaction between the grains. The system is considered to be a quasi 2D system by assuming the case when the ground state energy is dominated by the intrachain interactions. In this paper, the energy of such system for the equilibrium lattice configuration was calculated. In addition to theoretical calculations, the authors conducted the molecular dynamics simulations of the system of a two-dimensional lattice in complex plasmas. The MD simulation showed an excellent agreement with theoretical predictions.

Prof. Kalman and his co-authors show that the theoretical results calculated in their Letter are going to be feasible for future experiments on plasma crystals, and expect a great interest to the remarkable physics of such systems.