Obstacle driven fore-wake excitations in strongly coupled Yukawa fluids

Strongly coupled Yukawa fluids exhibit rich nonlinear dynamics arising from the interplay of strong correlations and thermal motion. In this regime, precursor (fore-wake) structures generated by a moving charged obstacle provide a direct probe of upstream transport of energy and momentum, as well as the non-equilibrium response of the medium. We combine first-principles molecular dynamics simulations with a generalized forced Korteweg–de Vries (fKdV) model to study these excitations over a broad range of parameters in Yukawa fluids. Our results show that precursor solitons are largely insensitive to the coupling strength in the strongly coupled regime, whereas screening has a dominant effect: stable upstream propagation is observed only in the weak-screening limit, κ≲1, while stronger screening suppresses propagation and favors localized or no structures, depending on the Mach number of the medium. An fKdV model incorporating Yukawa compressibility reproduces these trends quantitatively, providing a predictive framework for obstacle-driven nonlinear excitations in strongly coupled Yukawa fluids.