Related papers: Hard Spheres: Crystallization and Glass Formation
Hard-sphere colloids are popular as models for testing fundamental theories in condensed matter and statistical physics, from crystal nucleation to the glass transition. A single parameter, the volume fraction (phi), characterizes an ideal,…
Colloidal model systems allow for a flexible tuning of particle sizes, particle spacings and mutual interactions at constant temperature. Colloidal suspensions typically crystallize as soon as the interactions get sufficiently strong and…
We study the nucleation of nearly-hard charged colloidal particles. We use Monte Carlo simulations in combination with free-energy calculations to accurately predict the phase diagrams of these particles and map them via the freezing…
When strained beyond the linear regime, soft colloidal glasses yield to steady-state plastic flow in a way that is similar to the deformation of conventional amorphous solids. Due to the much larger size of the colloidal particles with…
We investigate the kinetics and the free energy landscape of the crystallization of hard spheres from a supersaturated metastable liquid though direct simulations and forward flux sampling. In this first paper, we describe and test two…
We use dynamic light scattering and numerical simulations to study the approach to equilibrium and the equilibrium dynamics of systems of colloidal hard spheres over a broad range of density, from dilute systems up to very concentrated…
Monte-Carlo simulations and small-angle x-ray scattering experiments were used to determine the phase diagram of aqueous dispersions of titratable nano-colloids with a moderate size polydispersity over a broad range of monovalent salt…
A widely spread method of crystal preparation is to precipitate it from a supersaturated solution. In such a process, control of solution concentration is of paramount importance. Nucleation process, polymorph selection, and crystal habits…
We study a colloidal suspension confined between two quasi-parallel walls as a model system for glass transitions in confined geometries. The suspension is a mixture of two particle sizes to prevent wall-induced crystallization. We use…
We use numerical simulations to study the crystallization of monodisperse systems of hard aspherical particles. We find that particle shape and crystallizability can be easily related to each other when particles are characterized in terms…
Thermoresponsive poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) particles of a nearly constant swelling ratio and with polydispersity indices (PDIs) varying over a wide range (7.4% - 48.9%) are synthesized to study the effects of polydispersity on…
Lithium disilicate glasses and glass-ceramics are good potential candidates for biomedical applications and solid-state batteries, and serve as models of nucleation and crystal growth. Moreover, these glasses exhibit a phase separation that…
As a model for a suspension of hard-sphere like colloidal particles where small nonadsorbing dissolved polymers create a depletion attraction, we introduce an effective colloid-colloid potential closely related to the Asakura-Oosawa model…
State-of-the-art techniques for simulating deeply supercooled liquids require a high degree of size polydispersity to be effective. While these techniques have enabled great insight into the microscopic dynamics near the glass transition,…
The process of homogeneous crystal nucleation has been considered in a model liquid, where the interparticle interaction is described by a short-range spherical oscillatory potential. Mechanisms of initiating structural ordering in the…
We analyse structure and dynamics in simulated high-concentration hard sphere colloidal suspensions by means of calculations based on the void space. We show that remoteness, a quantity measuring the scale of spaces, is useful in studying…
Using computer simulations, we identify the mechanisms causing aggregation and structural arrest of colloidal suspensions interacting with a short-ranged attraction at moderate and high densities. Two different non-ergodicity transitions…
We investigate how structural relaxation in mixtures with strong dynamical asymmetry is affected by the microscopic dynamics. Brownian and Newtonian dynamics simulations of dense mixtures of fast and slow hard spheres reveal a striking…
Enormous enhancement in the viscosity of a liquid near its glass transition is generally connected to the growing many-body static correlations near the transition, often coined as `amorphous ordering'. Estimating the length scales of such…
Specialized Monte Carlo simulation techniques and moment free energy method calculations, capable of treating fractionation exactly, are deployed to study the crystalline phase behaviour of an assembly of spherical particles described by a…