Collisional and collisionless expansion of Yukawa balls.

ABSTRACT

The expansion of Yukawa balls is studied by means of molecular dynamics simulations of collisionless and collisional situations. High computation speed was achieved by using the parallel computing power of graphics processing units. When the radius of the Yukawa ball is large compared to the shielding length, the expansion process starts with the blow-off of the outermost layer. A rarefactive wave subsequently propagates radially inward at the speed of longitudinal phonons. This mechanism is fundamentally different from Coulomb explosions, which employ a self-similar expansion of the entire system. In the collisionless limit, the outer layers carry away most of the available energy. The simulations are compared with analytical estimates. In the collisional case, the expansion process can be described by a nonlinear diffusion equation that is a special case of the porous medium equation.