Eur. Phys. J. E (2011) 34: 41
https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/i2011-11041-8

Temporal and structural characteristics of a two-dimensional gas of hard needles

¹ Department of Physics, Zanjan University, P.O. Box 311, Zanjan, Iran
² Computational physical sciences research laboratory, Department of Nano-Sciences, Institute for studies in theoretical Physics and Mathematics (IPM), P.O. Box 19395-5531, Tehran, Iran

^* e-mail: foolad@iasbs.ac.ir

Received: 29 March 2009
Accepted: 21 March 2011
Published online: 21 April 2011

Abstract

We have simulated the dynamics of a 2D gas of hard needles by event-oriented molecular dynamics. Various quantities namely translational and rotational diffusion constants and intermediate self-scattering function have been explored and their dependence on density is obtained. Despite absence of positional ordering, the rotational degree of freedom behaves nontrivially. Slowing down is observed in the angular part of the motion. It is shown that above a certain density the rotational mean-square displacement exhibits a three-stage regime including a plateau.