Shear Flows in Two Dimensional Strongly Coupled Yukawa Liquids: A Large Scale Molecular Dynamics Study

Molecular dynamics simulations have been extremely successful in the “first principles” investigation of complex plasmas. Typical examples include studies on phase transition [1], transport [2, 3] and collective behavior [4]. In this paper, we demonstrate the existence of large scale hydrodynamic phenomenology, such as the fundamental Kelvin‐Helmholtz instability in sheared flows in 2D Yukawa system by using large scale MD simulations [5] . The system size considered is macroscopic and of experimentally relevant dimensions. Our simulations capture the KH instability, its linear and nonlinear phases, nonlinear saturation leading to turbulence. Existence of inverse cascade, that is, the generation of large scale vortical flows from small scale flows is demonstrated. At the same time, we also show the appearance of dynamic, molecular‐level shear heating effects, which heats up the shear layer and thus altering the strong coupling parameter. At the nonlinear stage, while at the smallest scales, the shear heat front expands in the direction perpendicular to the flow, at the largest scale, inverse cascade continues. As our results are first‐principles‐based particle level description for large system sizes, effects predicted here using MD simulations should be demonstrable in laboratory 2D dusty plasmas.