Related papers: Visualizing kinetic pathways of homogeneous nuclea…
Despite the simplicity of its molecular unit, water is a challenging system because of its uniquely rich polymorphism and predicted but yet unconfirmed features. Introducing a novel space of generalized coordinates that capture changes in…
The nucleation of crystals in liquids is one of nature's most ubiquitous phenomena, playing an important role in areas such as climate change and the production of drugs. As the early stages of nucleation involve exceedingly small time and…
We study low-salt, binary aqueous suspensions of charged colloidal spheres of size ratio Phi = 0.57, number densities below the eutectic number density n_E, and number fractions of p = 1.00-0.40. The typical phase obtained by solidification…
We consider classical hard-core particles moving on two parallel chains in the same direction. An interaction between the channels is included via the hopping rates. For a ring, the stationary state has a product form. For the case of…
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…
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…
We report on a large scale computer simulation study of crystal nucleation in hard spheres. Through a combined analysis of real and reciprocal space data, a picture of a two-step crystallization process is supported: First dense, amorphous…
It is difficult to derive the solid--fluid transition from microscopic models. We introduce particle systems whose potentials do not decay with distance and calculate their partition function exactly using a method similar to that for…
By analytically solving some simple models of phase-ordering kinetics, we suggest a mechanism for the onset of non-equilibrium behaviour in colloid-polymer mixtures. These mixtures can function as models of atomic systems; their physics…
Nucleation of a solid in solid is initiated by the appearance of distinct dynamical heterogeneities, consisting of `active' particles whose trajectories show an abrupt transition from ballistic to diffusive, coincident with the…
We investigate the dynamical pathways of a geometric phase transition in a two-dimensional active lattice gas undergoing motility-induced phase separation. The transition is between metastable morphologies of the liquid cluster: a…
The early stage evolution of local atomic structures in a multicomponent metallic glass during its crystallization process has been investigated via molecular dynamics simulation. It is found that the initial thermal stability and earliest…
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 show how deeply quenching a liquid to temperatures where it is linearly unstable and the crystal is the equilibrium phase often produces crystalline structures with defects and disorder. As the solid phase advances into the liquid phase,…
We study the critical phenomena of the dynamical transition from a metastable state to a stable state in the model of first-order phase transition via two different triggering mechanisms. Three universal stages during the fully nonlinear…
Using self-consistent field and density-functional theories, we first investigate colloidal self-assembling of colloid/polymer films confined between two soft surfaces grafted by polymers. With the increase of colloidal concentrations, the…
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…
Cholesteric liquid crystals can exhibit spatial patterns in molecular alignment at interfaces that can be exploited for particle assembly. These patterns emerge from the competition between bulk and surface energies, tunable with the system…
The phase separation mechanism of a binary liquid mixture off-critically quenched in its miscibility gap is nucleation and growth, its homogeneous phase reaching a metastable equilibrium state. The successive stages of growth of the…
Homogeneous nucleation of a new phase near a second, continuous, transition, is considered. The continuous transition is in the metastable region associated with the first-order phase transition, one of whose coexisting phases is…