2025/04/30 by M. E. Caplan, Caplan, Matthew E., D. Yaacoub +1 · 1 citation
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Chemical and Physical Properties of Materials #Electromagnetic Effects on Materials #FOS: Physical sciences #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) #Plasma Physics (physics.plasm-ph) #Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR) #Theoretical and Computational Physics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2504.21608
openalex publication_date 2025/04/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Diffusion in Yukawa crystals is stochastic due to the thermally activated formation of vacancy-interstitial pairs, which have poor statistics in simulations. This makes it difficult to argue if Yukawa crystals exhibit normal diffusion, or if they could be subdiffusive or superdiffusive. To resolve this, we run a long molecular dynamics simulation of an idealized Yukawa crystal for a billion timesteps. We find no evidence of anomalous diffusion in the pure crystal, but also caution readers against overinterpreting this result as real crystals have complicated structures including grains and defects.