Crystallization of classical multicomponent plasmas.
We develop a method for calculating the equilibrium properties of the liquid-solid phase transition in a classical, ideal, multicomponent plasma. Our method is a semianalytic calculation that relies on extending the accurate fitting formulas available for the one-, two-, and three-component plasmas to the case of a plasma with an arbitrary number of components. We compare our results to those of C. J. Horowitz [Phys. Rev. E 75, 066101 (2007)], who used a molecular-dynamics simulation to study the chemical properties of a 17-species mixture relevant to the ocean-crust boundary of an accreting neutron star at the point where half the mixture has solidified. Given the same initial composition as Horowitz , we are able to reproduce to good accuracy both the liquid and solid compositions at the half-freezing point; we find abundances for most species within 10% of the simulation values. Our method allows the phase diagram of complex mixtures to be explored more thoroughly than possible with numerical simulations. We briefly discuss the implications for the nature of the liquid-solid boundary in accreting neutron stars.
Medin
Zach
Z
Department of Physics, McGill University, 3600 Rue University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2T8. zmedin@physics.mcgill.ca
Cumming
Andrew
A