Pan Hong, Kalman Gabor J, Hartmann Peter, Donkó Zoltán
Department of Physics, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 02467, USA.
Institute for Solid State Physics and Optics, Wigner Research Centre for Physics, P.O. Box 49, H-1525 Budapest, Hungary.
Phys Rev E. 2020 Oct;102(4-1):043206. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.102.043206.
The equilibrium structure and the dispersion relations of collective excitations in trilayer Yukawa systems in the strongly coupled liquid regime are examined. The equilibrium correlations reveal a variety of structures in the liquid phase, reminiscent of the corresponding structures in the solid phase. At small layer separation substitutional disorder becomes the governing feature. Theoretical dispersion relations are obtained by applying the quasilocalized charge approximation (QLCA) formalism, while numerical data are generated by microcanonical molecular dynamics simulations. The dispersions and polarizations of the collective excitations obtained through both of these methods are compared and discussed in detail. We find that the QLCA method is, in general, very satisfactory, but that there are phenomena not covered by the QLCA. In particular, by analyzing the dynamical longitudinal and transverse current fluctuation spectra we discover the existence of a structure not related to the collective mode spectra. This also provides insight into the long-standing problem of the gap frequency discrepancy, observed in strongly coupled layered systems in earlier studies.
