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Micrometre sized colloidal particles can be viewed as large atoms with tailorable size, shape and interactions. These building blocks can assemble into extremely rich structures and phases, in which the thermal motions of particles can be…
A chain of singly-charged particles, confined by a harmonic potential, exhibits a sudden transition to a zigzag configuration when the radial potential reaches a critical value, depending on the particle number. This structural change is a…
Viscoelastic phase separation of colloidal suspensions can be interrupted to form gels either by glass transition or by crystallization. With a new confocal microscopy protocol, we follow the entire kinetics of phase separation, from…
Motivated by old experiments on colloidal suspensions, we report molecular dynamics simulations of assemblies of hard spheres, addressing crystallization and glass formation. The simulations cover wide ranges of polydispersity s (standard…
We investigate the dynamical evolution of a thermodynamically unstable crystal surface into a hill-and-valley structure. We demonstrate that, for quasi one-dimensional ordering, the equation of motion maps exactly to the modified…
Two-dimensional colloidal suspensions exposed to periodic external fields exhibit a variety of molecular crystalline phases. There two or more colloids assemble at lattice sites of potential minima to build new structural entities, referred…
We present a computational study of assembling carbon clusters and nanophases in space from carbon aggregations. Geometry optimizations and Density-functional-based tight-binding (SCC-DFTB) dynamics methods are employed to predict carbon…
A well-known cluster expansion, which leads to virial expansion for the free energy of low density systems, is modified in such a way that it becomes applicable to the description of condensed state of matter. To this end, the averaging of…
We systematically explore the self-assembly of semi-flexible polymers in deformable spherical confinement across a wide regime of chain stiffness, contour lengths and packing fractions by means of coarse-grained molecular dynamics…
On microscopic scales, the crystallinity of flexible tethered or cross linked membranes determines their mechanical response. We show that by controlling the type, number and distribution of defects on a spherical elastic shell, it is…
Nucleation phenomena commonly observed in our every day life are of fundamental, technological and societal importance in many areas, but some of their most intimate mechanisms remain however to be unravelled. Crystal nucleation, the early…
The original Thomson problem of "spherical crystallography" seeks the ground state of electron shells interacting via the Coulomb potential; however one can also study crystalline ground states of particles interacting with other…
We minimize a discrete version of the fourth-order curvature based Landau free energy by extending Brakke's Surface Evolver. This model predicts spherical as well as non-spherical shapes with dimples, bumps and ridges to be the energy…
Landau Damping (LD) mechanism of the Localized Surface Plasmon (LSP) decay is studied for the hybrid nanoplasmonic (metal core/dielectric shell) structures. It is shown that LD in hybrid structures is strongly affected by permittivity and…
We use large-scale molecular dynamics simulations of a simple glass-forming system to investigate how its liquid-gas phase separation kinetics depends on temperature. A shallow quench leads to a fully demixed liquid-gas system whereas a…
Selected theoretical developments in modeling of deposition of submicrometer size (submicron) particles on solid surfaces, with and without surface diffusion, of interest in colloid, polymer, and certain biological systems, are surveyed. We…
We investigate the formation of protostellar clusters during the collapse of dense molecular cloud cores with a focus on the evolution of potential and kinetic energy, the degree of substructure, and the early phase of mass segregation. Our…
Using extensive numerical simulations, we study the fluidisation process of dense amorphous materials subjected to an external shear stress, using a three-dimensional colloidal glass model. In order to disentangle possible boundary effects…
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…
We have used mesoscale simulations to study the effect of immobile particles on microstructure formation during spinodal decomposition in ternary mixtures such as polymer blends. Specifically, we have explored a regime of interparticle…