Simulations of dusty plasmas using a special-purpose computer system for gravitational N-body problems

Abstract

Simulations of dusty plasmas were performed using GRAPE-6, a special-purpose computer designed for gravitational N-body problems. The collective behaviour of dust particles, which are injected into the plasma, was studied by means of three-dimensional computer simulations. As an example of a dusty plasma simulation, we have calculated movement of dust particles in plasmas under microgravity conditions. In this simulation, a dust-free region called the "void" is observed in the dust cloud. Another example was to simulate experiments on Coulomb crystals in plasmas. Formation of a Coulomb crystal was observed under typical laboratory conditions. For the simulation of a dusty plasma in microgravity with 3x10^4 particles, GRAPE-6 can perform the whole operation 1000 times faster than by using a Pentium4-1.6GHz CPU.