Session L36 - General Poster Session II.
POSTER session, Wednesday morning, March 22
Exhibit Hall, MCC
There is very keen interest from a thoretical as well as an experimental point of view to determine the initial conditions which one can use to predict the formation of a Wigner crystal in experiments. The density at which solids can be formed from individual particles is limited by the range of their interaction potential. Short-range forces can only bind particles at high density, whereas long-range forces, e.g. the Coulomb interaction, are capable of forming solids even at very low densities. Wigner predicted the existence of such a low-density Coulomb solid for electron systems, the so-called Wigner crystal. Recently, the experimental realization of a Wigner crystal was found in an electron system with charged calloidal particles in an aqueous solution, and charged dust particles in plasmas. Using numerical simulation, we demonstrate that there are several densities at which a Wigner crystal exists for the two dimensional electron gas.