Related papers: Hard Spheres: Crystallization and Glass Formation
Glass transition is accompanied by a rapid growth of the structural relaxation time and a concomitant decrease of configurational entropy. It remains unclear whether the transition has a thermodynamic origin, and whether the dynamic arrest…
We present a computer simulation study on crystal nucleation and growth in supersaturated suspensions of mono-disperse hard spheres induced by a triangular lattice substrate. The main result is that compressed substrates are wet by the…
In many technical applications, but also in natural processes like ice nucleation in clouds, crystallization proceeds in the presence of stresses and flows, hence the importance to understand the crystallization mechanism in simple…
Hard sphere colloidal particles are a basic model system for general research into phase behavior, ordering and out-equilibrium glass transitions. Experimentally it has been shown that oscillatory shearing of a monodisperse hard sphere…
We propose a connection between self-similar, focusing dynamics in nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) and macroscopic dynamic features of the glass transition. In particular, we explore the divergence of the appropriate…
We use theory and simulations to investigate the existence of amorphous glassy states in ultrasoft colloids. We combine the hyper-netted chain approximation with mode-coupling theory to study the dynamic phase diagram of soft repulsive…
We derive a microscopic criterion for the stability of hard sphere configurations, and we show empirically that this criterion is marginally satisfied in the glass. This observation supports a geometric interpretation for the initial rapid…
In the present work, crystallization in melts and poor-solvent solutions of semiflexible polymers with different concentration was studied by means of dissipative particle dynamics simulation technique. We use a coarse-grained polymer model…
The binary hard-sphere mixture is one of the simplest representations of a many-body system with competing time and length scales. This model is relevant to fundamentally understand both the structural and dynamical properties of materials,…
When a liquid is cooled well below its melting temperature at a rate that exceeds the critical cooling rate $R_c$, the crystalline state is bypassed and an amorphous glassy state forms instead. $R_c$ (or the corresponding critical casting…
We study the thermodynamic and dynamic phase transitions in two-dimensional polydisperse hard disks using Monte Carlo methods. A conventional local Monte Carlo algorithm allows us to observe a dynamic liquid-glass transition at a density,…
We investigate the structure and dynamics of a hard colloid-star polymer mixture in the range of its arrested phase separation, where an incipient demixing transition is interfering with a nearby vitrification line, focusing on the protein…
Unstable systems of fluidized grains in a very-narrow vertical tube can auto-defluidize after some time, the settling particles forming either a glass- or crystal-like structure. We carried out experiments using different polymer spheres,…
Quasi-two-dimensional (quasi-2D) colloidal hard-sphere suspensions confined in a slit geometry are widely used as two dimensional (2D) model systems in experiments that probe the glassy relaxation dynamics of 2D systems. However, the…
We consider the sedimentation of a colloidal gel under confinement in the direction of gravity. The confinement allows us to compare directly experiments and computer simulations, for the same system size in the vertical direction. The…
Our understanding of the growth of crystals is dominated by the classical description according to which individual atoms or molecules, driven by supersaturation, add to crystal facets. As a result, the growth of hard matter is still mostly…
The effect of cyclic loading on relaxation dynamics and mechanical properties of metallic glasses is studied using molecular dynamics simulations. We consider the Kob-Andersen three-dimensional binary mixture rapidly cooled across the glass…
We calculate the phase behavior of hard spheres with size polydispersity, using accurate free energy expressions for the fluid and solid phases. Cloud and shadow curves, which determine the onset of phase coexistence, are found exactly by…
Using Brownian dynamics computer simulations we show that a two-dimensional suspension of self-propelled ("active") colloidal particles crystallizes at sufficiently high densities. Compared to the equilibrium freezing of passive particles…
Roughening the surface of spherical colloids can drastically change their translational and rotational dynamics in dense suspensions. Using 3D confocal microscopy, we show that roughness not only lowers the concentration of the…