Related papers: Colloidal crystal growth at externally imposed nuc…
Cluster growth in a coagulating system of active particles (such as microswimmers in a solvent) is studied by theory and simulation. In contrast to passive systems, the net velocity of a cluster can have various scalings dependent on the…
We explore the crystallization in a colloidal monolayer on a structured template starting from a few-particle nucleus. The competition between the substrate structure and that of the growing crystal induces a new crystal growth scenario.…
We report numerical investigations of a three-dimensional model of diffusive growth of fine particles, the internal structure of which corresponds to different crystal lattices. A growing cluster (particle) is immersed in, and exchanges…
With computer simulations of the hard sphere model, we examine in detail the microscopic pathway connecting the metastable melt to the emergence of crystalline clusters. In particular we will show that the nucleation of the solid phase does…
The growth of crystals confined in porous or cellular materials is ubiquitous in Nature and industry. Confinement affects the formation of biominerals in living organisms, of minerals in the Earth's crust and of salt crystals damaging…
Colloidal model systems allow studying crystallization kinetics under fairly ideal conditions with rather well characterized pair interactions and minimized external influences. In complementary approaches therefore experiment, analytic…
We study the response of a nematic colloidal dispersion of rods to a driven probe particle which is dragged with high speed through the dispersion perpendicular to the nematic director. In front of the dragged particle, clusters of rods are…
Monolayer cluster growth in far-from-equilibrium systems is investigated by applying simulation and analytic techniques to minimal hard core particle (exclusion) models. The first model (I), for post-deposition coarsening dynamics, contains…
Experiments and simulations are used to study the kinetics of crystal growth in a mixture of magnetic and nonmagnetic particles suspended in ferrofluid. The growth process is quantified using both a bond order parameter and a mean domain…
When colloidal particles form a crystal phase on a spherical template, their packing is governed by the effective interaction between them and the elastic strain of bending the growing crystal. For example, if growth commences under…
We study the formation and growth of equilibrium clusters in a suspension of weakly-charged colloidal particles and small non-adsorbing polymers. The effective potential is characterised by a short-range attraction and a long-range…
We demonstrate a simple method by which time-dependent interactions can be exploited to improve self-assembly in colloidal systems. We apply this method to two systems: a model colloid with short-ranged attractive potentials that undergoes…
Nucleation is an activated process in which the system has to overcome a free energy barrier in order for a first-order phase transition between the metastable and the stable phases to take place. In the liquid-to-solid transition the…
Recent advances in classical density functional theory are combined with stochastic process theory and rare event techniques to formulate a theoretical description of nucleation, including crystallization, that can predict nonclassical…
We study crystallization in a model system for eicosane (C20) by means of molecular dynamics simulation and we identify the microscopic mechanisms of homogeneous crystal nucleation and growth. For the nucleation process, we observe that…
Crystallization represents the prime example of a disorder order transition. In realistic situations, however, container walls and impurities are frequently present and hence crystallization is heterogeneously seeded. Rarely the seeds are…
The stability of organic solar cells is strongly affected by the morphology of the photoactive layers, whose separated crystalline and/or amorphous phases are kinetically quenched far from their thermodynamic equilibrium during the…
We investigate the behavior of a mixture of asymmetric colloidal dumbbells and emulsion droplets by means of kinetic Monte Carlo simulations. The evaporation of the droplets and the competition between droplet-colloid attraction and…
Colloidal gels formed by strongly attractive particles at low particle volume fractions are composed of space-spanning networks of uniformly sized clusters. We study the thermal fluctuations of the clusters using differential dynamic…
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of simple models useful to analyze the growth of nanostructures obtained by cluster deposition. After detailing the potential interest of nanostructures, I extensively study the first stages of…