Complex Plasmas and Colloidal Dispersions

Complex plasmas and colloidal dispersions represent different states of soft matter. They are complementary in many ways, with the most important being that complex plasmas are virtually undamped at the particle timescales, whereas colloidal dispersions are overdamped and therefore can be brought into equilibrium in a very controlled manner. Otherwise, both fields have similar advantages: fully resolved 3D particle trajectories can easily be visualized, the pair interactions are tunable, and particles can be manipulated individually or collectively. These unique properties allow us to investigate generic processes occurring in liquids or solids at the most fundamental individual particle level. The principal research topics to be addressed in the book include: particle dynamics in liquids, with the emphasis on mesoscopic processes in the supercooled (glassy) state, e.g. dynamical heterogeneity, phase transitions in solids, with particular attention to the evolutionary paths of crystal structure development and defect dynamics, non-equilibrium phase transitions, with the focus on lane formation in driven binary systems and the dynamics at 'atomistic' timescales, phase separation in binary fluids, with the emphasis on the role of pair interactions in the demixing kinetics, hydrodynamics at the discreteness limit, especially the onset and development of hydrodynamic instabilities at the particle scale, and many others.