Astrophysics Colloquium: How Plasmas Freeze

At sufficiently high temperatures matter becomes fully ionized, but under sufficiently high pressure those plasmas freeze solid. These “strongly coupled” plasmas have Coulomb energies orders of magnitude greater than their thermal energies and can be found in systems spanning electrically charged dusts to the crusts of neutron stars. While many of the physically interesting combinations of temperature and density are inaccessible to laboratory experiments on earth, numerical simulations allow us to study the detailed microphysics of these crystals, including how they break, with implications for starquakes, pulsar glitches, and more.