Related papers: A Limit of Stability in Supercooled Liquid Cluster…
Glassy behavior is one of the main open problems in condensed matter physics. In this thesis, we approach the problem by studying spin-glasses and colloids, using several complementary strategies. From the point of view of model building,…
Jellium model achieved great success in predicting stable clusters with closed electronic shells and zero spin. In order to explain the stability of open shell clusters, it is necessary to consider the case of non-degenerate energy levels.…
Metastable nanostructures are kinetically trapped in local energy minima featuring intriguing surface and material properties. To unleash their potential, there is a need for non-equilibrium processes capable of stabilizing a large range of…
Metastable phases may be spontaneously formed from other metastable phases through nucleation. Here we demonstrate the spontaneous formation of a metastable phase from an unstable equilibrium by spinodal decomposition, which leads to a…
A theory of thermotropic nematic liquid crystals in which molecules form internally ordered clusters is presented. The formulation is based on the same mean field approximation and form of the anisotropic potential used in the Maier-Saupe…
Experiments show that isochoric (constant-volume) conditions enhance supercooling stability relative to isobaric (constant-pressure) conditions. Here, combining Helmholtz equilibrium thermodynamics with a first-order perturbation…
"Conventional" scenario of metastable melting in ordinary substances in the limit of zero temperature assumes that the melting curve reaches the matter zero isotherm ("cold curve"). The same is true for standard variant of one-component…
We investigate the relaxation mechanism of a supercooled tetrahedral liquid at its limit of stability using isothermal isobaric ($NPT$) Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. In similarity with systems which are far from equilibrium but near the…
Customarily, crystalline solids are defined to be {\em rigid} since they resist changes of shape determined by their boundaries. However, rigid solids cannot exist in the thermodynamic limit where boundaries become irrelevant. Particles in…
Phase transitions (liquid-solid, solid-solid) triggered by temperature changes are studied in free nanosized clusters of TeF_6 (SF_6) with different negative charges assigned to the fluorine atoms. Molecular dynamics simulations at constant…
We describe a first-principles statistical mechanics method to calculate the free energies of crystalline alloys that depend on temperature, composition, and strain. The approach relies on an extension of the alloy cluster expansion to…
The dramatic slowdown of glass-forming liquids has been variously linked to increasing dynamic and static correlation lengths. Yet, empirical evidence is insufficient to decide among competing theories. The random first order theory (RFOT)…
Crystal defect statistics is developed by minimizing the Gibbs free energy of defect formation, which is commonly converted to a crystallite size-independent equation by applying Stirling's approximation. Solutions of this equation forecast…
A muonium hydride molecule is a bound state of muonium and hydrogen atoms. It has half the mass of a parahydrogen molecule and very similar electronic properties in its ground state. The phase diagram of an assembly of such particles is…
The correlations of the free-energy landscape of mean-field spin glasses at different temperatures are investigated, concentrating on models with a first order freezing transition. Using a ``potential function'' we follow the metastable…
The properties of a macroscopic assembly of weakly-repulsive bosons at zero temperature are well described by Gross-Pitaevskii mean-field theory. According to this formalism the system exhibits a quantum transition from superfluid to…
To study the solution growth of crystals composed of chiral organic molecules, a spin-one Ising lattice gas model is proposed. The model turns out to be equivalent to the Blume-Emery-Griffiths model, which shows an equilibrium chiral…
With the help of EXACT ground states obtained by a polynomial algorithm we compute the domain wall energy at zero-temperature for the bond-random and the site-random Ising spin glass model in two dimensions. We find that in both models the…
This Article presents a nonequilibrium thermodynamic theory for the mean-field precipitation, aggregation and pattern formation of colloidal clusters. A variable gradient energy coefficient and the arrest of particle diffusion upon…
A system of a metastable phase with several sorts of heterogeneous centers is considered. An analytical theory for the process of decay in such a system has been constructed. The free energy of formation of a critical embryo is assumed to…