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Electrostatic properties and stability of Coulomb crystals
Author(s) -
Kozhberov Andrew
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
contributions to plasma physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.531
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1521-3986
pISSN - 0863-1042
DOI - 10.1002/ctpp.202000021
Subject(s) - coulomb , ion , hexagonal crystal system , lattice (music) , hexagonal lattice , physics , phonon , condensed matter physics , binary number , materials science , crystallography , quantum mechanics , chemistry , electron , arithmetic , mathematics , antiferromagnetism , acoustics
We calculate the electrostatic properties of more than 20 different Coulomb crystals and study their resistance to small oscillations of the ions around their equilibrium positions (phonon oscillations). We discuss the stability of multicomponent crystals against separation into set of one‐component lattices and for some cases, the influence of energy of the zero‐point vibrations. It is confirmed that the body‐centred cubic (bcc) lattice possesses the lowest electrostatic energy among all one‐component (one type of ion in the elementary cell) crystals. For systems composed of two types of ions (their charge and density numbers are Z 1 , n 1 and Z 2 , n 2 , respectively) and for n 1 = n 2 , it is found that the formation of a binary bcc lattice is possible at 1/2.4229 < α < 2.4229, where α ≡ Z 2 / Z 1 . Under the same conditions, the NaCl lattice forms at α > 5.197 and α < 0.192. While for n 2 = 2 n 1 , the MgB 2 lattice is found be stable at 0.1 < α < 0.32. For multicomponent lattices with hexagonal structure (binary hexagonal close‐packed, MgB 2 and some others lattices), it is shown that their properties depend on the distance between hexagonal layers and this distance changes with α .