Molecular dynamics simulations of dipolar dusty plasmas

We use molecular dynamics (MD) simulation methods to investigate dusty plasma crystal structure in an external potential, with the grains subject to both a spherically symmetric Debye-Huckel potential and a cylindrically symmetric dipole interaction. The dipole contribution models the experimentally important effects of ion flour or intrinsic grain polarization. We find that the addition of a small dipole term changes the crystal structure from bet to one in which the grains are aligned vertically, consistent with experiments as well as recent theoretical calculations.