Related papers: Depth-dependent ordering, two-length-scale phenome…
The plasticity transition at the yield strength of a crystal typically signifies the tendency of dislocation defects towards relatively unrestricted motion. For an isolated dislocation the motion is in the slip plane with velocity…
We investigate in this paper the ground state and the nature of the transition from an orientational ordered phase at low temperature to the disordered state at high temperature in a molecular crystal. Our model is a Potts model which takes…
The problem of heterogeneous nucleation of second-phase in alloys in the vicinity of elastic defects is considered. The defect can be a dislocation line or a crack tip residing in a crystalline solid. We use the Ginzburg-Landau equation to…
The nature of quantum criticality in CeCoIn$_5$ is studied by low-temperature thermal expansion $\alpha(T)$. At the field-induced quantum critical point at H=5 T a crossover scale $T^\star\approx 0.3$ K is observed, separating…
Mesoscale objects with unusual structural features may serve as the analogues of atoms in the design of larger-scale materials with novel optical, electronic or mechanical behaviour. In this paper we investigate the structural features and…
We consider the random wetting transition on the Cayley tree, i.e. the problem of a directed polymer on the Cayley tree in the presence of random energies along the left-most bonds. In the pure case, there exists a first-order transition…
The mechanical behaviors of polycrystalline solids are determined by the interplay between phenomena governed by two different thermodynamic temperatures: the configurational effective temperature that controls the density of dislocations,…
The selection of stacking order in a broad range of close-packed polymorphic materials remains a challenging enigma. Using in situ cryogenic transmission electron microscopy, we uncover the atomistic mechanisms governing the vapour…
We study the phenomenon of grain-boundary premelting for temperatures below the melting point in the phase-field crystal model of a pure material with hexagonal ordering in two dimensions. We investigate the structures of symmetric tilt…
Key traits of unicellular species, like cell size, often follow scale-free or self-similar distributions, hinting at the possibility of an underlying critical process. However, linking such empirical scaling laws to the critical regime of…
We generalize, and then use, a recently introduced formalism to study thermal fluctuations of atomic displacements in several two and three dimensional crystals. We study both close packed as well as open crystals with multi atom bases.…
Real crystals almost unavoidably contain a finite density of dislocations. We show that this generic type of long--range correlated disorder leads to a breakdown of the conventional scenario of critical behavior and standard renormalization…
The decay rate of metastable states is determined at high temperatures by thermal activation, whereas at temperatures close to zero quantum tunneling is relevant. At some temperature $T_{c}$ the transition from classical to…
The origin of the non commutativity of the limits $t \to \infty$ and $N \to \infty$ in the dynamics of first order transitions is investigated. In the large-N model, i.e. $N \to \infty$ taken first, the low temperature phase is…
We report the structure of transient fluctuations in the liquid phase of a two-dimensional system that exhibits several ordered phases with different symmetries. The density-temperature phase diagram of the system studied, composed of…
We consider the roughening of small angle grain boundaries consisting of arrays of dislocations and found two transitions, corresponding to fluctuations of the dislocations along and perpendicular to the boundaries. The latter contributes…
We use a discrete dislocation dynamics (DDD) approach to study the motion of a dislocation under strong stochastic forces that may cause bending and roughening of the dislocation line on scales that are comparable to the dislocation core…
Crystals are a state of matter characterised by periodic order. Yet crystalline materials can harbour disorder in many guises, such as non-repeating variations in composition, atom displacements, bonding arrangements, molecular…
The classification of structural phase transitions as displacive or order-disorder in character is usually based on spectroscopic data above the transition. We use single crystal x-ray diffraction to investigate structural correlations in…
Crack formation is conventionally described as a nucleation phenomenon despite the fact that the temperatures necessary to overcome the nucleation barrier are far too high. In this paper we consider the possibility that cracks are created…