Related papers: The microscopic pathway to crystallization in supe…
Recent computational studies have reported evidence of a metastable liquid-liquid phase transition (LLPT) in molecular models of water under deeply supercooled conditions. A competing hypothesis suggests, however, that non-equilibrium…
We study the nucleation of crystalline cluster phases in the generalized exponential model with exponent n=4. Due to the finite value of this pair potential for zero separation, at high densities the system forms cluster crystals with…
While uniform temperature has no effect on equilibrium properties of hard-core systems, its gradient might substantially change their behaviour. In particular, in hard-disk system subject to temperature difference $\Delta T$ disks are…
Bifurcations in kinetic pathways decide the evolution of a system. An example is crystallization, in which the thermodynamically stable polymorph may not form due to kinetic hindrance. Here, we use confined self-assembly to investigate the…
The research herein studies the Langevin dynamics allowing for an exchange of energy between liquid crystals and the thermal environment. This dynamics leads to fluctuation and dissipation behaviors in the motions of liquid crystals, and…
An approach is suggested for treating multiscale fluctuations in macromolecular systems. The emphasis is on the statistical properties of such fluctuations. The approach is illustrated by a macromolecular system with mesoscopic fluctuations…
Below the melting temperature $T_m$ crystals are the stable phase of typical elemental or molecular systems. However, cooling down a liquid below $T_m$, crystallization is anything but inevitable. The liquid can be supercooled, eventually…
Usually, supercooled liquids and glasses are thermodynamically unstable against crystallization. Classical nucleation theory (CNT) has been used to describe the crystallization dynamics of supercooled liquids. However, recent studies on…
In recent decades, computer simulations have found increasingly widespread use as powerful tools of studying phase transitions in wide variety of systems. In the particular and very important case of aqueous systems, the commonly used…
In recent years it has become widely accepted that a dynamical length scale {\xi}_{\alpha} plays an important role in supercooled liquids near the glass transition. We examine the implications of the interplay between the growing…
Controlled crystallization, melting and vitrification are important fundamental processes in nature and technology. However, the microscopic details of these fundamental phenomena still lack understanding, in particular how the cooling rate…
Modulating liquid-to-solid transitions and the resulting crystalline structure for tailored properties is much desired. Colloidal systems are exemplary to this end, but the fundamental knowledge gaps in relating the influence of…
How condensed-matter simulations depend on the number of molecules being simulated ($N$) is sometimes itself a valuable piece of information. Liquid crystals provide a case in point. Light scattering and $2d$-IR experiments on…
It is demonstrated by analyzing real examples that phase transitions in layered crystals occur like all other solid-state phase transitions by nucleation and crystal growth, but have a specific morphology. There the nucleation is epitaxial,…
We present here a numerical study of a lattice model of a chiral liquid. The low symmetry of the favoured local structure depresses the freezing point to reveal an exotic liquid-liquid transition characterised by the appearance of an…
This paper deals with the condensation of liquid droplets on hydrophobic and hydrophilic surfaces. A stochastic mesoscale model based on the theory of fluctuating hydrodynamics and the thermodynamics of a diffuse interface approach shows…
Nucleation in systems with a metastable liquid-gas critical point is the prototypical example of a two-step nucleation process, in which the appearance of the critical nucleus is preceded by the formation of a liquid-like density…
As mature neutron stars are cold (on the relevant temperature scale), one has to carefully consider the state of matter in their interior. The outer kilometer or so is expected to freeze to form an elastic crust of increasingly neutron-rich…
The very nature of glass is somewhat mysterious: while relaxation times in glasses are of sufficient magnitude that large-scale motion on the atomic level is essentially as slow as it is in the crystalline state, the structure of glass…
Molecular orientation fluctuations in ferroelectric smectic liquid crystals produce space charges, due to the divergence of the spontaneous polarization. These space charges interact with mobile ions, so that one must consider the coupled…