Related papers: Entropy-Driven Phase Transitions in Colloidal Syst…

Nucleation is the onset of a first-order phase transition by which a metastable phase transforms into a more stable one. Such a phase transition occurs when an initial system initially in equilibrium is destabilized by the change of an…

Over the last number of years several simulation methods have been introduced to study rare events such as nucleation. In this paper we examine the crystal nucleation rate of hard spheres using three such numerical techniques: molecular…

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…

The phase field theory of crystal nucleation described in [L. Granasy, T. Borzsonyi, T. Pusztai, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 206105 (2002)] is applied for nucleation in hard--sphere liquids. The exact thermodynamics from molecular dynamics is…

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…

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 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…

Electrostatic interactions in polymeric systems are responsible for a wide range of liquid-liquid phase transitions that are of importance for biology and materials science. Such transitions are referred to as complex coacervation, and…

Entropically driven fluid-solid transitions in monodisperse, purely repulsive hard spheres (MPRHS) are well established in theory, simulation, and experiment for atomic and colloidal systems. For MPRHS, however, coexistence is usually…

Purely entropic systems such as suspensions of hard rods, platelets and spheres show rich phase behavior. Rods and platelets have successfully been used as models to predict the equilibrium properties of liquid crystals for several decades.…

Systems with long-range interactions when quenced into a metastable state near the pseudo-spinodal exhibit nucleation processes that are quite different from the classical nucleation seen near the coexistence curve. In systems with…

We report simulations on the homogeneous liquid-fcc nucleation of charged colloids for both low and high contact energy values. As a precursor for crystal formation, we observe increased local order at the position where the crystal will…

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…

A grand canonical Monte Carlo method for the simulation of a simple colloid-polymer mixture called the AO model will be described. The phase separation known to occur in this model is driven by entropy. The phase diagram of the unmixing…

We present a computer simulation study on the crystal nucleation process in suspensions of hard spheres, fully taking into account the solvent hydrodynamics. If the dynamics of collodial crystallization were purely diffusive, the crystal…

The phase behavior of hard superballs is examined using molecular dynamics within a deformable periodic simulation box. A superball's interior is defined by the inequality $|x|^{2q} + |y|^{2q} + |z|^{2q} \leq 1$, which provides a versatile…

A cascade of phase transitions from square to hexagonal lattice is studied in 2D system of particles interacting via core-softened potential. Due to the presence of two length-scales of repulsion, different local configurations with four,…

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…

In this paper, we use the cell dynamics method to study the dynamics of phase transformation when three phases exist. The system we study is a two-dimensional system. The system is able to achieve three phases coexistence, which for…

We review how phase-field models contributed to the understanding of various aspects of crystal nucleation including homogeneous and heterogeneous processes, and their role in microstructure evolution. We recall results obtained both by the…