Transition pathways connecting crystals and quasicrystals
Abstract
Due to structural incommensurability, the emergence of a quasicrystal from a crystalline phase represents a challenge to computational physics. Here the nucleation of quasicrystals is investigated by using an efficient computational method applied to a Landau free-energy functional. Specifically, transition pathways connecting different local minima of the Lifshitz-Petrich model are obtained by using the high-index saddle dynamics. Saddle points on these paths are identified as the critical nuclei of the 6-fold crystals and 12-fold quasicrystals. The results reveal that phase transitions between the crystalline and quasicrystalline phases could follow two possible pathways, corresponding to a one-stage phase transition and a two-stage phase transition involving a metastable lamellar quasicrystalline state, respectively.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2007.15866,
title = {Transition pathways connecting crystals and quasicrystals},
author = {Jianyuan Yin and Kai Jiang and An-Chang Shi and Pingwen Zhang and Lei Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.15866},
year = {2022}
}