Phase transition in electrorheological plasmas

Applying an external electric AC field to a dusty plasma, the micro-particles arrange in strings or chains. In analogy to electrorheological fluids, such a system is called electrorheological plasma. Turning gradually the AC field into a DC field, the string formation is diminished until it vanishes completely in the DC case. In this way, a cross-over transition from a string-like to an isotropic micro-particle many-body system can be investigated. Experimental investigations of electrorheological plasmas are performed under microgravity conditions in parabolic flights. For analysing the image data, a supervised machine learning code was developed and a continuous cross over was found. A molecular dynamics simulation showed qualitatively similar results but also some deviations from the experimental results.