A novel approach of controlling the temperature of the molecular system in the presence of macroscale flows: a molecular dynamics study

The concept of configurational temperature is a novel way to estimate the temperature of the large degree of freedom system in which the instantaneous position of particles can be more accurately measured rather than instantaneous momenta. For interacting systems, based on Rugh's idea, we estimate temperature from both kinetic (read velocity) and configurational (read position) degrees for both equilibrium and non-equilibrium systems. We consider complex (dusty) plasma as a prototype where instantaneous particle positions are routinely measured in both laboratory experiments as well as computer simulations and are often modeled as Yukawa systems. We consider a 2D grain bed in a strongly coupled liquid state and perform molecular dynamics using two types of 'thermostats' namely traditional kinetic (velocity-based) and a novel configurational (or position based). A detailed comparison of both the thermostat on the evolution and dynamics of a complex plasma bed starting from 2D Kolmogorov flow is explored