Related papers: Crystallization: Colloidal suspense
Recent surveys of star forming regions have shown that most stars, and probably all massive stars, are born in dense stellar clusters. The mechanism by which a molecular cloud fragments to form several hundred to thousands of individual…
Colloidal model systems allow for a flexible tuning of particle sizes, particle spacings and mutual interactions at constant temperature. Colloidal suspensions typically crystallize as soon as the interactions get sufficiently strong and…
The relation between the notion of crystalline symmetry and characteristic time intervals when this symmetry could be observed is analyzed. Several time scales are shown to exist for a system of interacting particles. It is only when the…
We survey our research on modeling the mechanisms of control of uniformity in growth of nanosize and colloid particles. The former are produced as nanocrystals, by burst-nucleation from solution. The latter, colloid-size particles, are…
Ultrasoft colloids typically do not spontaneously crystallize, but rather vitrify, at high concentrations. Combining in-situ rheo-SANS experiments and numerical simulations we show that shear facilitates crystallization of colloidal star…
Herein, fundamentals of topology and symmetry breaking are used to understand crystallization and geometrical frustration in topologically close-packed structures. This frames solidification from a new perspective that is unique from…
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,…
Crystal surfaces may undergo thermodynamical as well kinetic, out-of-equilibrium instabilities. We consider the case of mound and pyramid formation, a common phenomenon in crystal growth and a long-standing problem in the field of pattern…
We present an experiment on crystallization of packings of macroscopic granular spheres. This system is often considered to be a model for thermally driven atomic or colloidal systems. Cyclically shearing a packing of frictional spheres, we…
Dynamical density functional simulations reveal structural aspects of crystal nucleation in undercooled liquids: the first appearing solid is amorphous, which promotes the nucleation of bcc crystals, but suppresses the appearance of the fcc…
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…
Stasis is a unique cosmological phenomenon in which the abundances of different energy components in the universe (such as matter, radiation, and vacuum energy) each remain fixed even though they scale differently under cosmological…
Colloidal particles are often seen as big atoms that can be directly observed in real space. They are therefore playing an increasingly important role as model systems to study processes of interest in condensed matter physics such as…
Crystallization represents a fundamental process engendering solidification of a material and determines its microstructure. Driven by complex phenomena at the atomic scale, its understanding for alloys still remains elusive. The present…
Understanding glass formation is a challenge because the existence of a true glass state, distinct from liquid and solid, remains elusive: Glasses are liquids that have become too viscous to flow. An old idea, as yet unproven…
We systematically study the relationship between equilibrium and non-equilibrium phase diagrams of a system of short-ranged attractive colloids. Using Monte Carlo and Brownian dynamics simulations we find a window of enhanced…
A dense-enough gas-accumulation evolves, over a few Myr of intensifying star formation, to an embedded cluster. If it contains a sufficient amount of mass, O stars form and explosively expel the remaining gas, whereas poorer clusters reduce…
The growth of quasicrystals, i.e., aperiodic structures with long-range order, seeded from the melt is investigated using a dynamical phase field crystal model. Depending on the thermodynamic conditions, two different growth modes are…
The quantum-mechanical expression for the polarization of a crystalline solid does not bear any resemblance to the (trivial) expression for the dipole of a bounded crystallite; and in fact it has been proved via a conceptually different…
Studies of evolved massive stars indicate that they form in a clustered mode. During the earliest evolutionary stages, these regions are embedded within their natal cores. Here, we show high-spatial-resolution interferometric dust continuum…