Related papers: Mechanisms of Dendrites Occurrence during Crystall…
We describe electrophoresis of spherical dielectric particles in a uniformly aligned nematic medium with a negative dielectric anisotropy. A spherical particle that orients the liquid crystal (LC) perpendicularly to its surface moves under…
Although the pattern formation on polymer gels has been considered as a result of the mechanical instability due to the volume phase transition, we found a macroscopic surface pattern formation not caused by the mechanical instability. It…
In supercooled liquids, vitrification generally suppresses crystallization. Yet some glasses can still crystallize despite the arrest of diffusive motion. This ill-understood process may limit the stability of glasses, but its microscopic…
Snow crystals growing from water vapor occasionally exhibit morphologies with three-fold (trigonal) symmetry, even though the ice crystal lattice has a molecular structure with six-fold symmetry. In extreme cases, thin platelike snow…
The freezing of colloidal suspensions is encountered in many natural and engineering processes. It can be harnessed through a process known as ice templating, to produce porous materials and composites exhibiting unique functional…
Particle condensates in general magnetic mirror geometries in high temperature plasma may be caused by a discrete resonance with thermal ion-acoustic background noise near mirror points. The resonance breaks the bounce symmetry, temporally…
We show how deeply quenching a liquid to temperatures where it is linearly unstable and the crystal is the equilibrium phase often produces crystalline structures with defects and disorder. As the solid phase advances into the liquid phase,…
Dielectrophoresis (DEP), the motion of polarizable particles in non-uniform electric fields, has become an important tool for the transport, separation, and characterization of microparticles in biomedical and nanoelectronics research. In…
Liquids crystallize as they cool; however, when crystallization is avoided in some way, they supercool, maintaining their liquidity, and freezing into glass at low temperatures, as ubiquitously observed. These metastable states crystallize…
Colloidal particles that are confined to an interface effectively form a two-dimensional fluid. We examine the dynamics of such colloids when they are subject to a constant external force, which drives them in a particular direction over…
We investigate with computer simulations the effect of applying an electric field on the water-to-ice transition. We use a combination of state-of-the-art simulation techniques to obtain phase boundaries and crystal growth rates (direct…
The effect of freezing on contact line motion is a scientific challenge in the understanding of the solidification of capillary flows. In this letter, we experimentally investigate the spreading and freezing of a water droplet on a cold…
The selection of stacking order in a broad range of close-packed polymorphic materials remains a challenging enigma. Using in situ cryogenic transmission electron microscopy, we uncover the atomistic mechanisms governing the vapour…
We present observations of the formation of plate-like snow crystals that provide evidence for an edge-enhancing crystal growth instability. This instability arises when the condensation coefficient describing the growth of an ice prism…
Initially, the acoustic field forced the droplets into an oblate spheroid shape, though the counteracting force of the cooling stream caused them to circularize. Droplet geometry was thus the net result of streaming forces and surface…
Quantum emitters in solid-state crystals have recently attracted a lot of attention due to their simple applicability in optical quantum technologies. The polarization of single photons generated by quantum emitters is one of the key…
We examine the crystallization dynamics of nanoparticles reversibly tethered by DNA hybridization. We show that the crystallization happens readily only in a narrow temperature "slot," and always proceeds via a two-step process, mediated by…
Radiation emitted by unpolarized high-energy electrons penetrating crystals may be linearly polarized. This occurs when the particle velocity makes an angle, with respect to some major crystal axis, being sufficiently larger than the…
Electric deflections of niobium clusters in molecular beams show that they have permanent electric dipole moments at cryogenic temperatures but not higher temperatures, indicating that they are ferroelectric. Detailed analysis shows that…
Below the melting temperature $T_m$ crystals are the stable phase of typical elemental or molecular systems. However, cooling down a liquid below $T_m$, crystallization is anything but inevitable. The liquid can be supercooled, eventually…