Related papers: Polymer-Enforced Crystallization of a Eutectic Bin…
The ability of some liquids to vitrify during supercooling is usually seen as a consequence of the rates of crystal nucleation (and/or crystal growth) becoming small- thus a matter of kinetics. However there is evidence, dating back to the…
Liquid crystalline polymers are materials of considerable scientific interest and technological value to society [1-3]. An important subset of such materials exhibit rubber-like elasticity; these can combine the remarkable optical…
The addition of minute amounts of chemically inert polyacrylamide polymer to liquids results in large instabilities under steady electro-osmotic pumping through 2:1 constrictions, demonstrating that laminar flow conditions can be broken in…
We study photopolymerization in a low-molecular weight liquid crystal with non-uniform director gradients. Phase separation results in spatially non-uniform distribution of polymer density controlled by the distorted nematic matrix.…
Sought-after ordered structures of mixtures of hard anisotropic nanoparticles can often be thermodynamically unfavorable due to the components' geometric incompatibility to densely pack into regular lattices. A simple compatibilization rule…
The influence of geometry on the local and global packing of particles is important to many fundamental and applied research themes such as the structure and stability of liquids, crystals and glasses. Here, we show by experiments and…
We address the crystallization of monodisperse hard spheres in terms of the properties of finite- size crystalline clusters. By means of large scale event-driven Molecular Dynamics simulations, we study systems at different packing…
We perform molecular dynamics simulations to compress binary hard spheres into jammed packings as a function of the compression rate $R$, size ratio $\alpha$, and number fraction $x_S$ of small particles to determine the connection between…
The stability of demixing phase transition in binary mixtures of hard plates (with thickness L and diameter D) and hard spheres (with diameter $\sigma$) is studied by means of Parsons-Lee theory. The isotropic-isotropic demixing, which is…
For nearly a century, introduction of nanoparticles to elastomers has yielded extraordinarily tough nanocomposites that are critical to technologies from actuators to tires. The mechanisms by which this reinforcement occurs have…
Monodisperse spherical colloidal particles confined within emulsion droplets can crystallize into icosahedral clusters. Experimentally it was observed that a few large colloidal particles added as defects preferentially migrate to the…
We examine, using molecular dynamics simulation, the structure and thermodynamics of the (100) and (111) disordered face-centered cubic (FCC) crystal/melt interfaces for a binary hard-sphere system. This study is an extension of our…
Mixtures of ideal polymers with hard spheres whose diameters are smaller than the radius of gyration of the polymer, exhibit extensive immiscibility. The interfacial tension between demixed phases of these mixtures is estimated, as is the…
We have carried out computer simulations of overcompressed suspensions of hard monodisperse ellipsoids and observed their crystallization dynamics. The system was compressed very rapidly in order to reach the regime of slow, glass-like…
The influence of size differences, shape, mass and persistent motion on phase separation in binary mixtures has been intensively studied. Here we focus on the exclusive role of diffusivity differences in binary mixtures of equal-sized…
Hard-sphere colloids are popular as models for testing fundamental theories in condensed matter and statistical physics, from crystal nucleation to the glass transition. A single parameter, the volume fraction (phi), characterizes an ideal,…
We systematically study the relationship between equilibrium and non-equilibrium phase diagrams of a system of short-ranged attractive colloids. Using Monte Carlo and Brownian dynamics simulations we find a window of enhanced…
The glass transition in binary mixtures of star polymers is studied by mode coupling theory and extensive molecular dynamics computer simulations. In particular, we have explored vitrification in the parameter space of size asymmetry…
We simulate binary soft disk systems in two dimensions, and investigate how the dynamics slow as the area fraction is increased toward the glass transition. The "fragility" quantifies how sensitively the relaxation time scale depends on the…
The detachment of a semi-ordered monolayer of polystyrene microspheres adhered to an aluminum-coated glass substrate is studied using a laser-induced spallation technique. The microsphere-substrate adhesion force is estimated from substrate…