Related papers: Hard Spheres: Crystallization and Glass Formation
Thermodynamic multi-component solution solidification approach to liquid-to-glass transition is proposed and actual mechanisms underlying vitrification, other than viscous slowdown, are identified. Due to polydisperse aggregation in liquid…
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…
Using molecular simulations, we shed light on the mechanism underlying crystal nucleation in metal alloys and unravel the interplay between crystal nucleation and glass transition, as the conditions of crystallization lie close to this…
We use event driven simulations to analyze glassy dynamics as a function of density and energy dissipation in a two-dimensional bidisperse granular fluid under stationary conditions. Clear signatures of a glass transition are identified,…
We discuss the nonlinear rheology of dense colloidal dispersions at the glass transition. A first principles approach starting with interacting Brownian particles in given arbitrary homogeneous (incompressible) flow neglecting hydrodynamic…
The solid-solid coexistence of a polydisperse hard sphere system is studied by using the Monte Carlo simulation. The results show that for large enough polydispersity the solid-solid coexistence state is more stable than the single-phase…
Within the mode-coupling theory for idealized glass transitions, we study the evolution of structural relaxation in binary mixtures of hard spheres with size ratios $\delta$ of the two components varying between 0.5 and 1.0. We find two…
Soft glassy materials often consist of deformable objects. Here, we use a two-dimensional assembly of semi-flexible ring polymers as a model system to investigate how polydispersity in particle stiffness or size influences the onset of…
Using fast confocal microscopy we image the three-dimensional dynamics of particles in a yielded hard-sphere colloidal glass under steady shear. The structural relaxation, observed in regions with uniform shear, is nearly isotropic but is…
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 introduce a new quantity to probe the glass transition. This quantity is a linear generalized compressibility which depends solely on the positions of the particles. We have performed a molecular dynamics simulation on a glass forming…
Glass forming liquids exhibit a rich phenomenology upon confinement. This is often related to the effects arising from wall-fluid interactions. Here we focus on the interesting limit where the separation of the confining walls becomes of…
Crystallization and vitrification of tetrahedral liquids are important both from a fundamental and a technological point of view. Here, we study via extensive umbrella sampling Monte Carlo computer simulations the nucleation barriers for a…
This thesis can be divided into two independent parts. In the first part of this thesis, we focus on studying the kinetic pathways of nucleation in colloidal systems. In Chapter 2, we briefly introduce the relevant theory of nucleation,…
The phase diagram of a polydisperse hard sphere system is examined by numerical minimization of a discretized form of the Ramakrishnan-Yussouff free energy functional. Crystalline and glassy local minima of the free energy are located and…
A fresh approach to the data from experiments with hard sphere colloids yields seminal insights into the glass transition. The precise determination of the fraction of particles caged by their neighbours is unprecedented and provides…
The onset of structural arrest and glass formation in a concentrated suspension of silica nanoparticles in a water-lutidine binary mixture near its consolute point is studied by exploiting the near-critical fluid degrees of freedom to…
Over the last number of years several simulation methods have been introduced to study rare events such as nucleation. In this paper we examine the crystal nucleation rate of hard spheres using three such numerical techniques: molecular…
We report on the results of a molecular dynamics simulation study of binodal glassy systems, formed in the process of isochoric rapid quenching from a high-temperature fluid phase. The transition to vitreous state occurs due to concurrent…
Hard sphere suspensions are well recognized model systems of statistical physics and soft condensed matter. We here investigate the temporal evolution of the immediate environment of nucleating and growing crystals and/or their global scale…