Related papers: Crystal growth as an excitable medium

The growth of crystals confined in porous or cellular materials is ubiquitous in Nature and industry. Confinement affects the formation of biominerals in living organisms, of minerals in the Earth's crust and of salt crystals damaging…

We developed a consistent mathematical model for isotropic crystal growth on a substrate covered by the mask material with a periodic series of parallel long trenches where the substrate is exposed to the vapor phase. Surface diffusion and…

A new model of crystal growth is presented that describes the phenomena on atomic length and diffusive time scales. The former incorporates elastic and plastic deformation in a natural manner, and the latter enables access to times scales…

The growth of a crystal is usually determined by its surface. Many factors influence the growth dynamics. Energy barriers associated with the presence of steps most often decide about the emerging pattern. The height and type of…

In this article, we introduce a framework to investigate the growth of nano-crystallites in a polymer matrix numerically. This framework combines the Flory theory of entropic elasticity with phase-field approaches commonly used to model…

We study the conditions under which and how an imposed cluster of fixed colloidal particles at prescribed positions triggers crystal nucleation from a metastable colloidal fluid. Dynamical density functional theory of freezing and Brownian…

The morphologies of two-dimensional (2D) crystals, nucleated, grown, and integrated within 2D elastic fluids, for instance in giant vesicle membranes, are dictated by an interplay of mechanics, permeability, and thermal contraction.…

We study analytically and numerical the growth rate of a crystal surface growing by several screw dislocations. To describe several spiral steps we use the revised level set method for spirals by the authors (Journal of Scientific Computing…

Several aspects of the theory of epitaxial crystal growth from atomic or molecular beams are developed from the perspective of statistical physics. Lectures are devoted to the rate equation theory of two-dimensional nucleation and its…

Crystallization is a fundamental process in materials science, providing the primary route for the realization of a wide range of new materials. Crystallization rates are also considered to be useful probes of glass-forming ability. At the…

A kinetic theory of homogeneous crystal nucleation in unary droplets is presented taking into account that a crystal nucleus can form not only in the volume-based mode (with all its facets within the droplet) but also in the…

We study a quasi-two-dimensional macroscopic system of magnetic spherical particles settled on a shallow concave dish under a temporally oscillating magnetic field. The system reaches a stationary state where the energy losses from…

We explore the crystallization in a colloidal monolayer on a structured template starting from a few-particle nucleus. The competition between the substrate structure and that of the growing crystal induces a new crystal growth scenario.…

Crystal growth processes produce a diverse array of surface formations, primarily distinguished by their geometric shapes. While some structures strictly adhere to the underlying crystal symmetry, others exhibit universal circular or oval…

When colloidal particles form a crystal phase on a spherical template, their packing is governed by the effective interaction between them and the elastic strain of bending the growing crystal. For example, if growth commences under…

A crystal of pure nickel grows from its melt at a rate that reaches 70 meters per second. This extraordinary growth rate has led to the suggestion that metallic crystals might provide the next generation of phase change materials. The huge…

The purpose of this paper is to review some elasticity effects in epitaxial growth. We start by a description of the main ingredients needed to describe elasticity effects (elastic interactions, surface stress, bulk and surface elasticity,…

Experiments on the formation of spiraling hexagons (350 - 1000 nm in width) from a solution of nanoparticles are presented. Transmission electron microscopy images of the reaction products of chemically synthesized cadmium nanocrystals…

Excitable media are ubiquitous in nature, and in such systems the local excitation tends to self-organize in traveling waves, or in rotating spiral-shaped patterns in two or three spatial dimensions. Examples include waves during a pandemic…

We study the evolution from a liquid to a crystal phase in two-dimensional curved space. At early times, while crystal seeds grow preferentially in regions of low curvature, the lattice frustration produced in regions with high curvature is…