Related papers: Crystallization of hard aspherical particles
The crystalline solids with lack of orientational ordering of anisotropic particles serve the purpose of studying the disordered systems with many fundamental applications in contemporary research. Despite the orientational disorder,…
Given recipe of qualitative, kinetic modelling by geometric methods of three-dimensional dendritic crystals. Characteristic features of the perturbations appearing on the surface of a spherical body, leading to different scenarios of the…
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…
We study the phase behavior of hard spheres confined between two parallel hard plates using extensive computer simulations. We determine the full equilibrium phase diagram for arbitrary densities and plate separations from one to five…
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…
One versatile route to the creation of two-dimensional crystal structures on the nanometer to micrometer scale is the self-assembly of colloidal particles at an interface. Here, we explore the crystal phases that can be expected from the…
We study by molecular dynamics the interplay between arrest and crystallization in hard spheres. For state points in the plane of volume fraction ($0.54 \leq phi \leq 0.63$) and polydispersity ($0 \leq s \leq 0.085$), we delineate states…
Using a phase field crystal model we study the structure and dynamics of a drop of colloidal suspension during evaporation of the solvent. We model an experimental system where contact line pinning of the drop on the substrate is…
Many standard structural quantities, such as order parameters and correlation functions, exist for common condensed matter systems, such as spherical and rod-like particles. However, these structural quantities are often insufficient for…
We investigate the collapse of three inelastic particles in dimension $d \geq 2$. We obtain general results of convergence and asymptotics concerning the variables of the dynamical system describing a collapsing system of particles. We…
We numerically study structural properties of mechanically stable packings of hard spheres (HS), in a wide range of packing fractions $0.53 \le \phi \le 0.72$. Detailed structural information is obtained from the analysis of orientational…
The crystallization of a metastable melt is one of the most important non equilibrium phenomena in condensed matter physics, and hard sphere colloidal model systems have been used for several decades to investigate this process by…
A fundamental characteristic of matter is its ability to form ordered structures under the right thermodynamic conditions. Predicting these structures - and their properties - from the attributes of a material's building blocks is the holy…
We investigate experimentally and numerically the defect configurations emerging when a cholesteric liquid crystal is confined to a spherical shell. We uncover a rich scenario of defect configurations, some of them non-existent in nematic…
The structure of the densest crystal packings is determined for a variety of concave shapes in 2D constructed by the overlap of two or three disks. The maximum contact number per particle pair is defined and proposed as a useful means of…
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…
A two-dimensional system of soft particles interacting via a two-length-scale potential is studied. Density functional theory and Brownian dynamics simulations reveal a fluid phase and two crystalline phases with different lattice spacing.…
Confocal microscopy of fluorescent labeled particles has been used to study the dynamical and structural properties of colloidal and granular matter in real space. Localization algorithms allow for a fully automatized determination of the…
We studied equilibrium systems composed of wedge-shaped monodisperse molecules using hard-particle Monte Carlo simulations. Each model molecule was made up of six colinear tangent spheres with linearly decreasing diameters. Thus, the shape…
Hard models for particle interactions have played a crucial role in the understanding of the structure of condensed matter. In particular, they help to explain the formation of oriented phases in liquids made of anisotropic molecules or…