Related papers: Hard Spheres: Crystallization and Glass Formation
We discuss crystal formation in supersaturated suspensions of monodisperse hard spheres with a concentration of hard spheres randomly pinned in space and time. The pinning procedure introduces an external length scale and an external time…
Unlike crystals, glasses age or devitrify over time, reflecting their non-equilibrium nature. This lack of stability is a serious issue in many industrial applications. Here, we show by numerical simulations that the devitrification of…
Recent theories predict that when a supercooled liquid approaches the glass transition, particle clusters with a special "amorphous order" nucleate within the liquid, which lead to static correlations dictating the dramatic slowdown of…
Computer simulations of the fluid-to-solid phase transition in the hard sphere system were instrumental for our understanding of crystallization processes. But while colloid experiments and theory have been predicting the stability of…
Predicting crystal nucleation is among the most significant long--standing challenges in condensed matter. In the system most studied (hard sphere colloids), the comparison between experiments performed using static light scattering and…
The interplay between densification and positional ordering during the process of crystal nucleation is a greatly investigated topic. Even for the simplest colloidal model -- hard spheres -- there has been much debate regarding the…
Motivated by the mean field prediction of a Gardner phase transition between a "normal glass" and a "marginally stable glass", we investigate the off-equilibrium dynamics of three-dimensional polydisperse hard spheres, used as a model for…
Successful computer studies of glass-forming materials need to overcome both the natural tendency to structural ordering and the dramatic increase of relaxation times at low temperatures. We present a comprehensive analysis of eleven…
We explore the glassy dynamics of soft colloids using microgels and charged particles interacting by steric and screened Coulomb interactions, respectively. In the supercooled regime, the structural relaxation time $\tau_\alpha$ of both…
Explicit simulations of fluid mixtures of highly size-dispersed particles are constrained by numerical challenges associated with identifying pair-interaction neighbors. Recent algorithmic developments have ameliorated these difficulties to…
We present an event-driven molecular dynamics study of glass formation in two-dimensional binary mixtures composed of hard disks and hard ellipses, where both types of particles have the same area. We demonstrate that characteristic…
We present molecular dynamics (MD) simulations results for dense fluids of ultrasoft, fully-penetrable particles. These are a binary mixture and a polydisperse system of particles interacting via the generalized exponential model, which is…
The most efficient way to pack equally sized spheres isotropically in 3D is known as the random close packed state, which provides a starting point for many approximations in physics and engineering. However, the particle size distribution…
Dating from experiments more than 20 years ago, it has been realized that the crystallization of hard colloidal particles in the vicinity of dynamical arrest has several anomalies, that render the conventional nucleation and growth model…
We use computer simulations to study the glass transition of dense fluids made of polydisperse, repulsive spheres. For hard particles, we vary the volume fraction, phi, and use compressible particles to explore finite temperatures, T>0. In…
In a recent publication we established an analogy between the free energy of a hard sphere system and the energy of an elastic network [1]. This result enables one to study the free energy landscape of hard spheres, in particular to define…
The equilibrium phase behaviour of hard spheres with size polydispersity is studied theoretically. We solve numerically the exact phase equilibrium equations that result from accurate free energy expressions for the fluid and solid phases,…
We determined bulk crystal nucleation rates in aqueous suspensions of charged spheres at low metastability. Experiments were performed in dependence on electrolyte concen-tration and for two different particle number densities. The…
Hard-sphere model systems are well-suited in both experiment and simulations to investigate fundamental aspects of the crystallization of fluids. In experiments on colloidal models of hard-sphere fluids, the uid is unavoidably at contact…
We report on a large scale computer simulation study of crystal nucleation in hard spheres. Through a combined analysis of real and reciprocal space data, a picture of a two-step crystallization process is supported: First dense, amorphous…