Coulomb balls in Experiment and Simulation.

Recently, it was shown that it is possible to confine spherical dust clouds in a plasma. It was found that these dust clouds have a crystalline structure which differs noteably from the well known fcc, bcc and hcp order in extended crystalline systems. The experiments show that the particles arrange in nested shells with hexagonal order on individual shells. The high transparency and the rather slow time scales of Coulomb balls allow to observe individual particles with video microscopy techniques and therefore to determine the structural properties of Coulomb balls with high accuracy. This contribution presents a comparison of experimental results and MD-Simulations. © 2005 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]