Molecular shear heating and vortex dynamics in thermostatted two dimensional Yukawa liquids

It is well known that two-dimensional macroscale shear flows are susceptible to instabilities leading to macroscale vortical structures. The linear and nonlinear fate of such a macroscale flow in a strongly coupled medium is a fundamental problem. A popular example of a strongly coupled medium is a dusty plasma, often modelled as a Yukawa liquid. Recently, laboratory experiments and molecular dynamics (MD) studies of shear flows in strongly coupled Yukawa liquids indicated the occurrence of strong molecular shear heating, which is found to reduce the coupling strength exponentially leading to the destruction of macroscale vorticity. To understand the vortex dynamics of strongly coupled molecular fluids undergoing macroscale shear flows and molecular shear heating, MD simulation has been performed, which allows the macroscopic vortex dynamics to evolve, while at the same time removes the microscopically generated heat without using the velocity degrees of freedom. We demonstrate that by using a configurational thermostat in a novel way, the microscale heat generated by shear flow can be thermostatted out efficiently without compromising the large scale vortex dynamics. In the present work, using MD simulations, a comparative study of shear flow evolution in Yukawa liquids in the presence and absence of molecular or microscopic heating is presented for a prototype shear flow, namely, Kolmogorov flow. Published by AIP Publishing.