Related papers: A Molecular Study of CaCO$_3$ cluster configuratio…
Crystallization is a key step in macromolecular structure determination by crystallography. While a robust theoretical treatment of the process is available, due to the complexity of the system, the experimental process is still largely one…
We investigated the nucleation process at the molecular level. Controlled sticking of individual atoms onto mass selected clusters over a wide mass range has been carried out for the first time. We measured the absolute unimolecular…
Phase transitions ruled by nucleation and growth can occur by nonrandom arrangement of nuclei. This is verified, for instance, in thin film growth at solid surfaces by vapor condensation or by electrodeposition where, around each nucleus, a…
Neutral grains made of the same dielectric material can attain considerable charges due to collisions and generate long-range interactions. We perform molecular dynamic simulations in three dimensions for a dilute, freely-cooling granular…
We develop a coarse grained (CG) approach for efficiently simulating calcium dynamics in the endoplasmic reticulum membrane based on a fine stochastic lattice gas model. By grouping neighboring microscopic sites together into CG cells and…
Nucleation in small volumes of water has garnered renewed interest due to the relevance of pore condensation and freezing under conditions of low partial pressures of water, such as in the upper troposphere. Molecular simulations can in…
Volatility-dependent fractionation of the rock-forming elements at high temperatures is an early, widespread process during formation of the earliest solids in protoplanetary disks. Equilibrium condensation calculations allow prediction of…
Calcite has the ability to host large amounts of intracrystalline inclusions, a phenomenon that is known to be the case in biominerals and has been demonstrated in bio-inspired synthetic systems. In this study, we focused on barium as the…
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…
Heat input roughly balances radiative cooling in the gaseous cores of galaxy clusters even when the central cooling time is short, implying that cooling triggers a feedback loop that maintains thermal balance. Furthermore, cores with short…
The initial conditions in high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions are determined by the small momentum fraction part of the nuclear wavefunction. This is the regime of gluon saturation and the most direct way to experimentally study it would…
We survey our research on modeling the mechanisms of control of uniformity in growth of nanosize and colloid particles. The former are produced as nanocrystals, by burst-nucleation from solution. The latter, colloid-size particles, are…
Strongly first-order phase transitions, i.e., those with a large order parameter, are characterized by a considerable supercooling and high velocities of phase transition fronts. A very strong phase transition may have important…
The kinetics of carbon condensation, or carbon clustering, in detonation of carbon-rich high explosives is modeled by solving a system of rate equations for concentrations of carbon particles. Unlike previous efforts, the rate equations…
A common approach to study nucleation rates is the estimation of free-energy barriers. This usually requires knowledge about the shape of the forming droplet, a task that becomes notoriously difficult in macromolecular setups starting with…
We investigate a new mechanism for the cosmological QCD phase transition: inhomogeneous nucleation. The primordial temperature fluctuations, measured to be $\delta T/T \sim 10^{-5}$, are larger than the tiny temperature interval, in which…
In a cluster crystal, each lattice site is occupied by multiple soft-core particles. As the number density is increased at zero temperature, a `cascade' of isostructural phase transitions can occur between states whose site occupancy…
Nucleation, the birth of a stable cluster from disorder, is inherently stochastic. Yet up to date, there are no quantitative studies on NaCl nucleation that accounts for its stochastic nature. Here, we report the first stochastic treatment…
Unlike atoms, colloidal particles are not identical, but can only be synthesised within a finite size tolerance. Colloids are therefore polydisperse, i.e. mixtures of infinitely many components with sizes drawn from a continuous…
NaCl crystal nucleation from metastable solutions has long been considered to occur according to a single-step mechanism. Recent experimental observations suggest that NaCl crystals emerge from disordered intermediates which is seemingly at…