Related papers: Elasticity of a polydisperse hard-sphere crystal
Elastic constants of two-dimensional (2D) colloidal crystals are determined by measuring strain fluctuations induced by Brownian motion of particles. Paramagnetic colloids confined to an air-water interface of a pending drop are…
The fluid - crystal equilibria of polydisperse mixtures of hard spheres have been studied by computer simulation of the solid phase and using an accurate equation of state for the fluid. A new scheme has been developed to evaluate the…
The elastic and transport coefficients of a perfect face-centered cubic crystal of hard spheres are computed from the poles of the dynamic structure factor and of the spectral functions of transverse momentum density fluctuations. For such…
Investigating thermodynamic properties of liquid-solid transitions of flexible homopolymers with elastic bonds by means of multicanonical Monte Carlo simulations, we find crystalline conformations that resemble ground-state structures of…
We consider the theory of fluctuations of a colloidal solid observed in a confocal slice. For a cubic crystal we study the evolution of the projected elastic properties as a function of the anisotropy of the crystal using numerical methods…
Slow dynamics in a fluid are studied in one of the most basic systems possible: polydisperse hard spheres. Monodisperse hard spheres cannot be studied as the slow down in dynamics as the density is increased is preempted by crystallisation.…
The effect of polydispersity on the freezing transition of hard spheres is examined within a moment description. At low polydispersities a single fluid-to-crystal transition is recovered. With increasing polydispersity we find a density…
Recent confocal experiments on colloidal solids motivate a fuller study of the projection of three-dimensional fluctuations onto a two-dimensional confocal slice. We show that the effective theory of a projected crystal displays several…
The elastic constants of hcp $^{4}$He are computed using the path-integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) method. The stiffness coefficients are obtained by imposing different distortions to a periodic cell containing 180 atoms, followed by measurement…
Motivated by old experiments on colloidal suspensions, we report molecular dynamics simulations of assemblies of hard spheres, addressing crystallization and glass formation. The simulations cover wide ranges of polydispersity s (standard…
We report on the determination of high-pressure elasticity from thermal diffuse x-ray scattering of magnesium oxide at pressures up to 28 GPa. We find that the full elasticity tensor as a function of pressure can be extracted from x-ray…
Classical hard spheres crystallize at equilibrium at high enough density. Crystals made up of stackings of 2-dimensional hexagonal close-packed layers (e.g. fcc, hcp, etc.) differ in entropy by only about $10^{-3}k_B$ per sphere (all…
Recent progress in approaches to determine the elastic constants of solids starting from the microscopic particle interactions is reviewed. On the theoretical side, density functional theory approaches are discussed and compared to more…
We study the elasticity of perfect 4He at zero-temperature using the diffusion Monte Carlo method and a realistic semi-empirical pairwise potential to describe the He-He interactions. Specifically, we calculate the value of the elastic…
Although much is known about the metastable liquid branch of hard spheres--from low dimension $d$ up to ${d\to\infty}$--its crystal counterpart remains largely unexplored for $d>3$. In particular, it is unclear whether the crystal phase is…
Polydisperse mixtures are those in which components with a whole range of sizes are present. It is shown that the fluid phase of polydisperse hard spheres is thermodynamically unstable unless the density of large spheres decreases at least…
The phase-field crystal model (PFC) describes crystal structures at diffusive timescales through a periodic order parameter representing the atomic density. One of its main features is that it naturally incorporates elastic and plastic…
The phase diagram of soft spheres with size dispersion has been studied by means of an optimized Monte Carlo algorithm which allows to equilibrate below the kinetic glass transition for all sizes distribution. The system ubiquitously…
We report on a laser generated and detected surface acoustic wave method for evaluating the elastic constants of micro-crystals composing polycrystalline steel. The method is based on the measurement of surface wave velocities in many…
In complex crystals close to melting or at finite temperatures, different types of defects are ubiquitous and their role becomes relevant in the mechanical response of these solids. Conventional elasticity theory fails to provide a…