Related papers: Liquids more stable than crystals
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
We report theoretical and numerical evaluations of the phase diagram for patchy colloidal particles of new generation. We show that the reduction of the number of bonded nearest neighbours offers the possibility of generating liquid states…
We study the kinetics of the liquid-to-crystal transformation and of gel formation in colloidal suspensions of oppositely charged particles. We analyse, by means of both computer simulations and experiments, the evolution of a fluid…
Glasses and gels are the two dynamically arrested, disordered states of matter. Despite their importance, their similarities and differences remain elusive, especially at high density. We identify dynamical and structural signatures which…
Gels are low-packing arrested states of matter which are able to support stress. On cooling, limited valence colloidal particles form open networks stabilized by the progressive increase of the interparticle bond lifetime. These gels, named…
When liquids are cooled sufficiently rapidly below their melting temperature, they may bypass crystalization and, instead, enter a long-lived metastable supercooled state that has long been the focus of intense research. Although they…
When we lower the temperature of a liquid, at some point we meet a first order phase transition to the crystal. Yet, under certain conditions it is possible to keep the system in its metastable phase and to avoid crystallization. In this…
When a multicomponent liquid composed of particles with random interactions is slowly cooled below the freezing temperature, the fluid reorganises in order to increase (decrease) the number of strong (weak) attractive interactions and…
A fluid in a pore can form diverse heterogeneous structures. We combine a capillary description with the cubic-plus-association equation of state to study the thermodynamic stability of droplets, bubbles and films of water at 358 K in a…
The phase diagram of model anisotropic particles with four attractive patches in a tetrahedral arrangement has been computed at two different values for the range of the potential, with the aim of investigating the conditions under which a…
Pure liquids in thermodynamic equilibrium are structurally homogeneous. In liquid crystals, flow and light pulses are used to create reconfigurable domains with polar order. Moreover, through careful engineering of concerted microfluidic…
Recent theories predict that when a supercooled liquid approaches the glass transition, particle clusters with a special "amorphous order" nucleate within the liquid, which lead to static correlations dictating the dramatic slowdown of…
There are at least three fundamental states of matter, depending upon temperature and pressure: gas, liquid, and solid (crystal). These states are separated by first-order phase transitions between them. In both gas and liquid phases the…
We study a model in which particles interact with short-ranged attractive and long-ranged repulsive interactions, in an attempt to model the equilibrium cluster phase recently discovered in sterically stabilized colloidal systems in the…
Patchy colloidal model with three and four equivalent patches, confined in the attractive random porous media, undergo re-entrant gas-liquid phase separation with the possibility for the liquid phase density to approach zero. This unusual…
Despite the omnipresence of colloidal suspensions, little is known about the influence of shape on phase transformations, especially in nonequilibrium. To date, real-space imaging results are limited to systems composed of spherical…
Mixtures of quantum fluids, that is gases or liquids, are considered with the emphasis on the conditions characterizing the stability of the mixtures. The mixtures, that can be formed by cold atoms or molecules, are assumed to be quantum…
An open question is whether the liquid and glassy phases of water are thermodynamically distinct or continuous. Here we address this question using molecular dynamics simulations in comparison with neutron scattering experiments to study…
We study the phase ordering dynamics of a two dimensional model colloidal solid using molecular dynamics simulations. The colloid particles interact with each other with a Hamaker potential modified by the presence of equatorial "patches"…
Dynamical heterogeneities in a colloidal fluid close to gelation are studied by means of computer simulations. A clear distinction between some fast particles and the rest, slow ones, is observed, yielding a picture of the gel composed by…