Nucleation in sheared granular matter
Soft Condensed Matter
2018-02-07 v4 Materials Science
Abstract
We present an experiment on crystallization of packings of macroscopic granular spheres. This system is often considered to be a model for thermally driven atomic or colloidal systems. Cyclically shearing a packing of frictional spheres, we observe a first order phase transition from a disordered to an ordered state. The ordered state consists of crystallites of mixed FCC and HCP symmetry that coexist with the amorphous bulk. The transition, initiated by homogeneous nucleation, overcomes a barrier at 64.5% volume fraction. Nucleation consists predominantly of the dissolving of small nuclei and the growth of nuclei that have reached a critical size of about ten spheres.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1705.02984,
title = {Nucleation in sheared granular matter},
author = {Frank Rietz and Charles Radin and Harry L. Swinney and Matthias Schröter},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.02984},
year = {2018}
}