A preliminary study of the effect of an external magnetic field in strongly coupled pair-ion plasmas

The pair plasmas represent an interesting state of matter with unique thermodynamic properties drastically different from ordinary electron-ion plasmas have attracted special attention. For example, the oppositely charged ion species possess same dynamical properties owing to same masses and electric charge magnitude. Moreover, their dynamical time scale is different from electron-ion plasmas which leads to distinct thermodynamical behaviour. Recently, phase transitional study in strongly coupled 2D Pair-ion Plasma system with soft core was carried out by S. Baruah et al. and interesting phase co-existence between liquid-like and vapour-like phases were observed in absence of the external magnetic field, the critical temperature of vapour-liquid coexistence was also obtained. In our present study, the influence of an external magnetic field on phase transition in strongly coupled pair-ion plasmas is investigated. Extensive Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations are performed in canonical ensembles, for such plasmas, for different values of the magnetic field strength. We also used a novel method in which the temperature is changed in a single step (quenching) in order to place the system in a thermodynamically and mechanically unstable state and the results are discussed here. (author)