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Collective dynamics of complex plasma bilayers

A classical dusty plasma experiment was performed using two different dust grain sizes to form a strongly coupled asymmetric bilayer (two closely spaced interacting monolayers) of two species of charged dust particles. The observation and analysis of the thermally excited particle oscillations revealed the collective mode structure and wave dispersion in this system; in particular the existence of the theoretically predicted $k=0$ energy (frequency) gap was verified. Equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations were performed to emulate the experiment, assuming Yukawa type inter-particle interaction. The simulations and analytic calculations based both on lattice summation and on the QLCA approach are in good agreement with the experimental findings and help identifying and characterizing the observed phenomena.