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Granular crystallisation is an important phenomenon whereby ordered packing structures form in granular matter under vibration. However, compared with the well-developed principles of crystallisation at the atomic scale, crystallisation in…
The geometric shape, symmetry, and topology of colloidal particles often allow for controlling colloidal phase behavior and physical properties of these soft matter systems. In liquid crystalline dispersions, colloidal particles with low…
The helical Dirac states on the surface of a topological insulator are protected by topology and display significant particle-hole asymmetry. This asymmetry arises from a subdominant Schr\"{o}dinger type contribution to the Hamiltonian…
Our understanding of phases of matter relies on symmetry breaking, one example being water ice whose crystalline structure breaks the continuous translation symmetry of space. Recently, breaking of time translation symmetry was observed in…
We explore mechanisms of orbital order decay in doped Mott insulators $R_{1-x}$(Sr,Ca)$_x$VO$_3$ ($R=\,$Pr,Y,La) caused by charged (Sr,Ca) defects. Our unrestricted Hartree-Fock analysis focuses on the combined effect of random, charged…
Low-dimensional organic conductors could establish themselves as model systems for the investigation of the physics in reduced dimensions. In the metallic state of a one-dimensional solid, Fermi-liquid theory breaks down and spin and charge…
The effect of strong confinement on the positional and orientational ordering is examined in a system of hard rectangular rods with length L and diameter D (L>D) using the Parsons-Lee modification of the second virial density functional…
In this paper the amorphous/solid to disorder liquid structural phase transitions of an anomalous confined fluid is analyzed using their local fractal dimension. The model is a system of particles interacting through a two length scales…
Systems of hard shapes crystallize due to entropy. How is entropy distributed among translational and rotational microscopic contributions? We answer this question by decomposing thermal fluctuation of crystals of hard hexagons into…
Most studies on melting under confinement focus only on the solid and liquid melt phases. Despite of its ubiquity, contributions from the capillary interface (liquid / vapor interface) are often neglected. In this study the melting behavior…
We theoretically investigate the pitch of lyotropic cholesteric phases composed of slender rods with steric chirality transmitted via a weak helical deformation of the backbone. In this limit, the model is amenable to analytical treatment…
It has been suggested that the metal-insulator transitions in a number of spinel materials with partially-filled t_2g d-orbitals can be explained as orbitally-driven Peierls instabilities. Motivated by these suggestions, we examine…
Phase transitions of systems confined in long cylindrical pores (capillary condensation, wetting, crystallization, etc.) are intrinsically not sharply defined but rounded. The finite size of the cross section causes destruction of long…
We study the microstructural glass transitions in diblock-copolymer melts using a thermodynamic replica approach. Our approach performs an expansion in terms of the natural smallness parameter -- the inverse of the scaled degree of…
Concentrated colloidal suspensions of nanorods often exhibit liquid-crystalline (LC) behavior. The transition to a nematic LC phase, with long-range orientational order of the particles, is usually well captured by Onsager's theory for hard…
The nematic ordering in semiflexible polymers with contour length $L$ exceeding their persistence length $\ell_p$ is described by a confinement of the polymers in a cylinder of radius $r_{eff}$ much larger than the radius $r_\rho$, expected…
Amorphous interfacial complexions have been shown to restrict grain growth and improve damage tolerance in nanocrystalline alloys, with increased chemical complexity stabilizing the complexions themselves. Here, we investigate local…
The behaviour of materials under spatial confinement is sensitively dependent on the nature of the confining boundaries. In two dimensions, confinement within a hard circular boundary inhibits the hexagonal ordering observed in bulk systems…
We investigate the stability of an inhomogeneous chiral condensed phase against low energy fluctuations about a spatially modulated order parameter. This phase corresponds to the so-called dual chiral density wave in the context of quark…
Computer simulations give precious insight into the microscopic behavior of supercooled liquids and glasses, but their typical time scales are orders of magnitude shorter than the experimentally relevant ones. We recently closed this gap…