Demixing-stimulated lane formation in binary complex plasma

Recently lane formation and phase separation have been reported for experiments with binary complex plasmas in the PK3-Plus laboratory onboard the International Space Station (ISS). Positive non-additivity of particle interactions is known to stimulate phase separation (demixing), but its effect on lane formation is unknown. In this work, we used Langevin dynamics (LD) simulation to probe the role of non-additivity interactions on lane formation. The competition between laning and demixing leads to thicker lanes. Analysis based on anisotropic scaling indices reveals a crossover from normal laning mode to a demixing-stimulated laning mode. Extensive numerical simulations enabled us to identify a critical value of the non-additivity parameter Δ for the crossover.