Investigation and improvement of three-dimensional plasma crystal analysis.

In this work, existing methods for plasma crystal analysis are investigated using artificial and simulated calibration data, which reproduce a multiphase system consisting of fcc, hcp, and bcc crystal data. Disturbances of the artificial data including Gaussian noise, stretching, and randomly missing particles are used to investigate the methods thoroughly. A popular method, called bond order parameter, has been repeatedly criticized as a structure analysis tool and will be improved with the help of a recent development. The method is called the bcc-sensitive Minkowski structure metric. It enhances robustness and consistency, while remaining compatible with previous bond-order-based results. Also, a promising method rooted in the molecular dynamics community is tested, yielding detailed insight of bond-order-specific drawbacks. With this investigation, the state of three-dimensional plasma crystal analysis will be significantly improved.