Related papers: Visualizing kinetic pathways of homogeneous nuclea…
Phase transformations such as freezing typically start with heterogeneous nucleation. Heterogeneous nucleation near a wetting transition, of a crystalline phase is studied. The wetting transition occurs at or near a vapour-liquid transition…
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…
In experimental systems, colloidal particles are virtually always at least somewhat polydisperse, which can have profound effects on their ability to crystallize. Unfortunately, accurately predicting the effects of polydispersity on phase…
Solid-solid phase transitions are ubiquitous in nature, but the kinetic pathway of anisotropic particle systems remains elusive, where the coupling between translational and rotational motions plays a critical role in various kinetic…
Despite its fundamental and technological importance, a microscopic understanding of the crystallization process is still elusive. By computer simulations of the hard-sphere model we reveal the mechanism by which thermal fluctuations drive…
The process of homogeneous crystal nucleation has been considered in a model liquid, where the interparticle interaction is described by a short-range spherical oscillatory potential. Mechanisms of initiating structural ordering in the…
In this paper we have explored computationally the solidification process of large nickel clusters. This process has the characteristic features of the first order phase transition occurring in a finite system. The focus of our research is…
Crystallization is one of the most important phase transformations of first order. In the case of metals and alloys, the liquid phase is the parent phase of materials production. The conditions of the crystallization process control the…
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…
We use the Dynamic Density-Functional Formalism and the Fundamental Measure Theory as applied to a fluid of parallel hard squares to study the dynamics of heterogeneous growth of non-uniform phases with columnar and crystalline symmetries.…
Recent studies of the phase diagram for spherical, purely repulsive, active particles established the existence of a transition from a liquid-like to a solid-like phase analogous to the one observed in colloidal systems at thermal…
Phase transitions ruled by nucleation and growth can occur by nonrandom arrangement of nuclei. This is verified, for instance, in thin film growth at solid surfaces by vapor condensation or by electrodeposition where, around each nucleus, a…
We performed dynamic simulations of spheres with short-range attractive interactions for many values of interaction strength and range. Fast crystallization occurs in a localized region of this parameter space, but the character of…
The kinetics of phase transition processes often governs the resulting material microstruc-ture. Using optical microscopy, we here investigate the formation and stabilization of a po-rous crystalline microstructure forming in low-salt…
We investigate the early part of the crystal nucleation process in the hard sphere fluid using data produced by computer simulation. We find that hexagonal order manifests continuously in the overcompressed liquid, beginning approximately…
It is commonly believed that the transition line separating a liquid and a solid cannot be interrupted by a critical point. This opinion is based on the traditional symmetry argument that an isotropic liquid cannot be continuously…
We test the performance of a recently proposed fundamental measure density functional of aligned hard cylinders by calculating the phase diagram of a monodisperse fluid of these particles. We consider all possible liquid crystalline…
The existing experiments and simulations suggest that the molecular symmetry is always transmitted to homogeneous phases in liquid crystals. It has been proved for rod-like molecules. We conjecture that it holds for three other symmetries,…
According to classical nucleation theory, a crystal grows from a small nucleus that already bears the symmetry of its end phase - but experiments with colloids now reveal that, from an amorphous precursor, crystallites with different…
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 unraveled. Crystal nucleation, the early…