Related papers: Phase Behavior of Colloidal Superballs: Shape Inte…
This thesis can be divided into two independent parts. In the first part of this thesis, we focus on studying the kinetic pathways of nucleation in colloidal systems. In Chapter 2, we briefly introduce the relevant theory of nucleation,…
Soft colloids allow to explore high density states well beyond random close packing. An important open question is whether softness controls the dynamics under these dense conditions. While experimental works reported conflicting results,…
A theoretical study of toroidal membranes with various degrees of intrinsic orientational order is presented at mean-field level. The study uses a simple Ginzburg-Landau style free energy functional, which gives rise to a rich variety of…
Interaction of solid state qubits with environmental degrees of freedom strongly affects the qubit dynamics, and leads to decoherence. In quantum information processing with solid state qubits, decoherence significantly limits the…
We study the phase behaviour of a fluid composed of particles which interact via a pair potential that is repulsive for large inter-particle distances, is attractive at intermediate distances and is strongly repulsive at short distances…
Deterministic quasiperiodicity in quantum systems has long been associated with localization, criticality, or glassy behavior, and has therefore been believed to suppress long-range order rather than stabilize it. Here we demonstrate the…
Shape anisotropy of colloidal nanoparticles has emerged as an important design variable for engineering assemblies with targeted structure and properties. In particular, a number of polyhedral nanoparticles have been shown to exhibit a rich…
Colloidal particles are often seen as big atoms that can be directly observed in real space. They are therefore playing an increasingly important role as model systems to study processes of interest in condensed matter physics such as…
Understanding how colloidal suspensions behave in confined environments has a striking relevance in practical applications. Despite the fact that the behaviour of colloids in the bulk is key to identify the main elements affecting their…
Using isobaric Monte Carlo simulations, we map out the entire phase diagram of a system of hard cylindrical particles of length $L$ and diameter $D$, using an improved algorithm to identify the overlap condition between two cylinders. Both…
A sheared cube is made out of a cube by giving a shear to the body in one direction keeping one of the faces fixed. We investigate here the thermodynamic phase behavior of a family of such regular hard sheared cubes, each of the members of…
Supersolidity -- a quantum-mechanical phenomenon characterized by the presence of both superfluidity and crystalline order -- was initially envisioned in the context of bulk solid helium, as a possible answer to the question of whether a…
The statistical mechanics of phase transitions in dense systems of polydisperse particles presents distinctive challenges to computer simulation and analytical theory alike. The core difficulty, namely dealing correctly with particle size…
Recently proposed by the author theory of the Q-balls mechanism of high-Tc superconductivity in cuprates is applied to explanation of known experimental data. The Q-balls (nontopological solitons) of coherently condensed spin/charge density…
The dipole-coupled two-level atoms(qubits) in a single-mode resonant cavity is studied by extended bosonic coherent states. The numerically exact solution is presented. For finite systems, the first-order quantum phase transitions occur at…
We report the discovery of a mixed orientational structure in the quasi-one-dimensional fluid of hard non-spherical bodies with the exact calculation of the thermodynamic and structural quantities using the transfer operator method. The…
Following the recent proposal to create quadrupolar gases [S.G. Bhongale et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 155301 (2013)], we investigate what quantum phases can be created in these systems in one dimension. We consider a geometry of two…
Phase transitions inside the pores of an aerogel are investigated by modelizing the aerogel structure by diffusion-limited cluster-cluster aggregation on a cubic lattice in a finite box and considering $q$-states Potts variables on the…
The cosmological remnants of a first-order phase transition generally depend on the perturbations that the walls of expanding bubbles originate in the plasma. Several of the formation mechanisms occur when bubbles collide and lose their…
Orientational and positional ordering properties of liquid crystal monolayers are examined by means of Fundamental-Measure Density Functional Theory. Particles forming the monolayer are modeled as hard parallelepipeds of square section of…