Related papers: Liquids more stable than crystals
We speculate that glass-forming liquids may contain fairly large and well-defined crystallites. This is based on arguing that the slowly relaxing "frozen-in" stresses characterizing ultraviscous liquids increase the barrier for nucleation,…
Water, a subject of human fascination for millennia, is likely the most studied substance on Earth, with an entire scientific field -- hydrodynamics -- dedicated to understanding water in motion. However, when water flows through…
The thermodynamic equilibrium conditions for compact structures composed by mass varying particles are discussed assuming that the so-called dynamical mass behaves like an additional extensive thermodynamic degree of freedom. It then…
A muonium hydride molecule is a bound state of muonium and hydrogen atoms. It has half the mass of a parahydrogen molecule and very similar electronic properties in its ground state. The phase diagram of an assembly of such particles is…
Self-bound many-body systems are formed through a balance of attractive and repulsive forces and occur in many physical scenarios. Liquid droplets are an example of a self-bound system, formed by a balance of the mutual attractive and…
The qualitative behavior of charged particles in a vacuum is given by Earnshaw's Theorem which states that there is no steady configuration of charged particles in a vacuum which is asymptotically stable to perturbations. In a viscous…
The liquid-liquid critical point scenario of water hypothesizes the existence of two metastable liquid phases---low-density liquid (LDL) and high-density liquid (HDL)---deep within the supercooled region. The hypothesis originates from…
Many of the large structures of the cell, such as the cytoskeleton, are assembled and maintained far from equilibrium. We study the stabilities of various structures for a simple model of such a far-from-equilibrium organized assembly in…
We computed the phase diagram for a system of model anisotropic particles with six attractive patches in an octahedral arrangement. We chose to study this model for a relatively narrow value of the patch width where the lowest-energy…
A two-dimensional system of soft particles interacting via a two-length-scale potential is studied. Density functional theory and Brownian dynamics simulations reveal a fluid phase and two crystalline phases with different lattice spacing.…
A characteristic property of many soft matter systems is an ultrasoft effective interaction between their structural units. This softness often leads to complex behavior. In particular, ultrasoft systems under pressure demonstrate…
The interplay between short-range attractions and long-range repulsions (SALR) characterizes the so called liquids with competing interactions, which are known to exhibit a variety of equilibrium and non-equilibrium phases. The theoretical…
Recent efforts to deal with the complexities of the liquid state, particularly those of glassforming systems, have focused on the "energy landscape" as a means of dealing with the collective variables problem [1]. The "basins of attraction"…
We use theory and simulations to investigate the existence of amorphous glassy states in ultrasoft colloids. We combine the hyper-netted chain approximation with mode-coupling theory to study the dynamic phase diagram of soft repulsive…
Gels in soft-matter systems are an important nonergodic state of matter. We study a colloid-polymer mixture which is quenched by increasing the polymer concentration, from a fluid to a gel. Using confocal microscopy, we study both the…
The stability of multi-electron bubbles in liquid helium is investigated theoretically. We find that multi-electron bubbles are unstable against fission whenever the pressure is positive. It is shown that for moving bubbles the Bernoulli…
Glass is a microscopically disordered, solid form of matter that results when a fluid is cooled or compressed in such a fashion that it does not crystallise. Almost all types of materials are capable of glass formation -- polymers, metal…
Colloidal particles trapped at an interface between two fluids can form a wide range of different structures. Replacing one of the fluid with a liquid crystal increases the complexity of interactions and results in a greater range of…
It is well-known that the liquid properties in a strongly confined system can be very different from their ordinary behaviors in an extended system, due to the competition between the thermal energy and the interaction energy. Here we show…
While deeply supercooled liquids exhibit divergent viscosity and increasingly heterogeneous dynamics as the temperature drops, their structure shows only seemingly marginal changes. Understanding the nature of relaxation processes in this…