Related papers: Surface effects in the crystallization process of …
The phase diagram of colloidal hard superballs, of which the shape interpolates between cubes and octahedra via spheres, is determined by free-energy calculations in Monte Carlo simulations. We discover not only a stable face-centered cubic…
We consider polymers made of magnetic monomers (Ising or Heisenberg-like) in a good solvent. These polymers are modeled as self-avoiding walks on a cubic lattice, and the ferromagnetic interaction between the spins carried by the monomers…
Phase transformations can be difficult to characterize at the microscopic level due to the inability to directly observe individual atomic motions. Model colloidal systems, by contrast, permit the direct observation of individual particle…
Liquid crystals are synthetic and biological viscoelastic anisotropic soft matter materials that combine liquid fluidity with crystal anisotropy and find use in optical devices, sensor/actuators, lubrication, super-fibers. Frequently…
The study of the properties of glass-forming liquids is difficult for many reasons. Analytic solutions of mean field models are usually available only for systems embedded in a space with an unphysically high number of spatial dimensions;…
We address the physics of nematic liquid crystalline elastomers randomly crosslinked in the isotropic state. To do this, we construct a phenomenological effective replica Hamiltonian in terms of two order-parameter fields: one for the…
A self-consistent theory of bulk electrolytes incorporating electrostatic and hard-core interactions on an equal level is applied to the two-dimensional Coulomb liquid with finite ion size. The ionic pair distributions, the structure…
We report a numerical calculation of the elastic constants of the fcc and hcp crystal phases of monodisperse hard-sphere colloids. Surprisingly, some of these elastic constants are very different (up to 20%), even though the free energy,…
Dispersion properties of electromagnetic crystals formed by small uniaxial resonant scatterers (magnetic or electric) are studied using the local field approach. The goal of the study is to determine the conditions under which the…
We use an elastic model to explore faceting of solid-wall vesicles with elastic heterogeneities. We show that faceting occurs in regions where the vesicle wall is softer, such as areas of reduced wall thicknesses or concentrated in…
We investigate quasicrystal-forming soft matter using a two-scale phase field crystal model. At state points near thermodynamic coexistence between bulk quasicrystals and the liquid phase, we find multiple metastable spatially localized…
Zero- and two-dimensional crystal defects form in open statistical ensembles, such as the grand canonical, that are usually inaccessible with conventional simulation techniques. This longstanding challenge is overcome with a new Hamiltonian…
The discrete Gaussian model for the surface of a crystal deposited on a disordered substrate is studied by Monte Carlo simulations. A continuous transition is found from a phase with a thermally-induced roughness to a glassy one in which…
We determine the structure and melting behavior of supported metallic clusters using an ab initio density-functional-based treatment of intracluster interactions and an approximate treatment of the surface as an idealized smooth plane…
We investigate the formation of cluster crystals with multiply occupied lattice sites on a spherical surface in systems of ultra-soft particles interacting via repulsive, bounded pair potentials. Not all interactions of this kind lead to…
We analyze the freezing and collapse transition of a simple model for flexible polymer chains on simple cubic and face-centered cubic lattices by means of sophisticated chain-growth methods. In contrast to bond-fluctuation polymer models in…
Using molecular dynamics simulations of a tangent-soft-sphere bead-spring polymer model, we examine the degree to which semiflexible polymer melts solidify at isostaticity. Flexible and stiff chains crystallize when they are isostatic as…
We review the recent literature on the simulation of the structure and deformation of amorphous glasses, including oxide and metallic glasses. We consider simulations at different length and time scales. At the nanometer scale, we review…
We consider homogeneous crystallisation rates in confocal microscopy experiments on colloidal nearly hard spheres at the single particle level. These we compare with Brownian dynamics simuations by carefully modelling the softness in the…
We experimentally study the crystallization of a monolayer of vibrated discs with a built-in polar asymmetry, a model system of active liquids, and contrast it with that of vibrated isotropic discs. Increasing the packing fraction $\phi$,…