Related papers: Precursor-mediated crystallization process in susp…
Two-step crystallization via a metastable intermediate phase is often regarded as a non-classical process that lies beyond the framework of classical nucleation theory (CNT). In this work, we investigate two-step crystallization in…
We present classical density functional theory calculations of the free energy landscape for fluids below their triple point as a function of density and crystallinity. We find that for both a model globular protein and for a simple atomic…
Glass-like materials are nonequilibrium systems where the relaxation time may exceed reasonable time scales of observations. In the present paper a dynamic percolation model is introduced in order to explain the principal properties of…
Studying the crystallization process of silicon is a challenging task since empirical potentials are not able to reproduce well the properties of both semiconducting solid and metallic liquid. On the other hand, nucleation is a rare event…
Stars are often observed to form in clusters. It is therefore important to understand how such a region of concentrated mass is assembled out of the diffuse medium and its properties eventually prescribe the important physical mechanisms…
We study the evolution from a liquid to a crystal phase in two-dimensional curved space. At early times, while crystal seeds grow preferentially in regions of low curvature, the lattice frustration produced in regions with high curvature is…
Nucleation and growth of solids from solutions impacts many natural processes and are fundamental to applications in materials engineering and medicine. For a crystalline solid, the nucleus is a nanoscale cluster of ordered atoms, which…
We report a numerical study of the rate of crystal nucleation in a binary suspension of oppositely charged colloids. Two different crystal structures compete in the thermodynamic conditions under study. We find that the crystal phase that…
We investigate the effects of the reversal of the gravitational field onto a sedimented and partially crystallised suspension of nearly-hard sphere colloids. We analyse the structural changes that take place during the melting of the…
We present a confocal-microscopy study of demixing and remixing in binary liquids containing colloidal particles. First, particle-stabilized emulsions have been fabricated by nucleation and growth of droplets upon cooling from the…
The metastable vapor-liquid coexistence of short-range attractive fluids hinders the formation of crystal nuclei, which in turn makes difficult the progress of the system towards its vapor-solid ground state. In this letter we show that…
Studies of nucleation generally focus on the properties of the critical cluster, but the presence of defects within the crystal lattice means that the population of nuclei necessarily evolve through a distribution of pre-critical clusters…
The thermodynamics of strongly anisotropic crystalline surfaces is analogous to that of a binary mixture exhibiting phase separation. On a metastable planar surface, formation of stable orientations requires a nucleation process, in which…
We investigate the response of a system of hard spheres to two classes of perturbations over a range of densities spanning the fluid, crystalline, and glassy regimes within a molecular dynamics framework. Firstly, we consider the relaxation…
Molecular dynamics simulations are performed to study the [100] and [111] orientations of the crystal-melt interface between an ordered two-component hard sphere with a NaCl structure and its coexisting binary hard-sphere fluid. The…
Recent theoretical studies have predicted a new clustering mechanism for soft matter particles that interact via a certain kind of purely repulsive, bounded potentials. At sufficiently high densities, clusters of overlapping particles are…
The crystal nucleation from liquid in most cases is too rare to be accessed within the limited timescales of the conventional molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. Here, we developed a "persistent embryo" method to facilitate crystal…
The process of homogeneous crystal nucleation has been considered in a model liquid, where the interparticle interaction is described by a short-range spherical oscillatory potential. Mechanisms of initiating structural ordering in the…
We use computer simulations to study the dynamics of a physical gel at high densities where gelation and the glass transition interfere. We report and provide detailed physical understanding of complex relaxation patterns for time…
We present a theory that explains the experimentally observed crystallisation of a dilute dysprosium condensate into a lattice of droplets. The key ingredient of our theory is a conservative three-body interaction which stabilises the…