Related papers: Hard sphere crystallization gets rarer with increa…
Using molecular dynamics simulations, we have determined that the nature of dynamical heterogeneity in jammed liquids is very sensitive to short-ranged attractions. Weakly attractive systems differ little from dense hard-sphere and…
A mechanically-based structural optimization method is utilized to explore the phenomena of jamming for assemblies of frictionless Platonic solids. Systems of these regular convex polyhedra exhibit mechanically stable phases with density…
The solidification of metallic droplets into powder particles involves a complex interplay between heat diffusion, surface tension, and geometric constraints. In confined, curved systems -- such as those encountered in atomisation,…
Recent experiments have created supersolids of dipolar quantum droplets. The resulting crystals lack, however, a genuine cohesive energy and are maintained by the presence of an external confinement, bearing a resemblance to the case of ion…
The fact that a disordered material is not constrained in its properties in the same way as a crystal presents significant and yet largely untapped potential for novel material design. However, unlike their crystalline counterparts,…
Few equilibrium --even less so nonequilibrium-- statistical-mechanical models with continuous degrees of freedom can be solved exactly. Classical hard-spheres in infinitely many space dimensions are a notable exception. We show that even…
The discrepancy in nucleation rate densities between simulated and experimental hard spheres remains staggering and unexplained. Suggestively, more strongly sedimenting colloidal suspensions of hard spheres nucleate much faster than weakly…
We investigate the growth of two-dimensional (2D) crystals on fluctuating surfaces using a phase field crystal model that is relevant on atomic length and diffusive time scales. Motivated by recent experiments which achieved unprecedented…
We simulate a hard-sphere liquid in confined geometry where the separation of the two parallel, hard walls is smaller than two particle diameters. By systematically reducing the wall separation we analyze the behavior of structural and…
Static and dynamic properties of two-dimensional bidisperse dissipative particles are numerically studied near the jamming transition. We investigate the dependency of the critical scaling on the ratio of the different diameters and find a…
We simulate a two-dimensional array of droplets being compressed between two walls. The droplets are adhesive due to an attractive depletion force. As one wall moves toward the other, the droplet array is compressed and eventually induced…
A theory is developed to calculate values of the potential energy barriers to structural relaxation in molecular glass formers from the data of static pair correlation function. The barrier height is shown to increase due to increase in…
An increasing variety of crystal structures has been observed in soft condensed matter over the past two decades, surpassing most expectations for the diversity of arrangements accessible through classical driving forces. Here, we survey…
The unconventional thermal properties of jammed amorphous solids are directly related to their density of vibrational states. While the vibrational spectrum of jammed soft sphere solids has been fully described, the vibrational spectrum of…
We show that in the equilibrium phase of glass-forming hard-sphere fluids in three dimensions, the static length scales tentatively associated with the dynamical slowdown and the dynamical length characterizing spatial heterogeneities in…
There is increasing evidence that entropy can induce microphase separation in binary fluid mixtures interacting through hard particle potentials. One such phase consists of alternating two dimensional liquid-like layers of rods and spheres.…
A fundamental characteristic of matter is its ability to form ordered structures under the right thermodynamic conditions. Predicting these structures - and their properties - from the attributes of a material's building blocks is the holy…
We explore the interplay of membrane curvature and nonspecific binding due to excluded-volume effects among colloidal particles inside lipid bilayer vesicles. We trapped submicron spheres of two different sizes inside a pear-shaped,…
We focus on polymer-grafted nanoparticles (PGNP). A PGNP is composed of two different layers: the hard core of a nanoparticle and the soft corona of grafted polymers on the surface. It is predicted that PGNPs with these two distinct layers…
Using fully minimized fundamental measure functionals, we investigate free energies, vacancy concentrations and density distributions for bcc, fcc and hcp hard-sphere crystals. Results are complemented by an approach due to Stillinger which…