Related papers: Crystallization Inhibitors: Explaining Experimenta…
Nucleation is an activated process in which the system has to overcome a free energy barrier in order for a first-order phase transition between the metastable and the stable phases to take place. In the liquid-to-solid transition the…
The phenomenon of salt creeping along a free surface remains only partially understood, particularly with respect to its dynamics. In this work, combining a theoretical model with controlled experiments, we identify three distinct kinetic…
Starting from a protein solution which is metastable with respect to the crystalline phase, the effect of adding semidilute non-adsorbing polymer is considered. It is found to increase the chemical potential of the protein by a few tenths…
Uniform and multi-dispersed grain packs have been frequently used to conceptually study flow in porous media. Numerical simulations were previously used to address the effect of particle shape on characteristics, such as pore space fractal…
Solvation of ions is ubiquitous on our planet. Solvated ions have a profound effect on the behavior of ionic solutions, which is crucial in nature and technology. Experimentally, ions have been classified into "structure makers" or…
Salt is a very common molecule in aqueous environments but the question of whether the interactions of monovalent ions Na^+ and Cl^- ,with the neutral heads of phospholipids are impactful enough to change the membrane rigidity is still a…
We have developed a software package CALYPSO (Crystal structure AnaLYsis by Particle Swarm Optimization) to predict the energetically stable/metastable crystal structures of materials at given chemical compositions and external conditions…
We use numerical simulations to understand how random deviations from the ideal spherical shape affect the ability of hard particles to form fcc crystalline structures. Using a system of hard spheres as a reference, we determine the…
We give a bird's-eye view of the plastic deformation of crystals aimed at the statistical physics community, and a broad introduction into the statistical theories of forced rigid systems aimed at the plasticity community. Memory effects in…
The aim of this review paper is to give a panoramic of the impact of spin glass theory and statistical physics in the study of the K-sat problem. The introduction of spin glass theory in the study of the random K-sat problem has indeed left…
An analysis of glass formation for polymer melts that are diluted by structured molecular additives is derived by using the generalized entropy theory, which involves a combination of the Adam-Gibbs model and the direct computation of the…
Over the past two decades, a large number of studies addressed the topic of crystal nucleation in suspensions of hard spheres. The shared result of all these efforts is that, at low super-saturations, experimentally observed nucleation…
Rapid solidification leads to unique microstructural features, where a less studied topic is the formation of various crystalline defects, including high dislocation densities, as well as gradients and splitting of the crystalline…
Cloud droplets containing ice-nucleating particles (INPs) may freeze at temperatures above the homogeneous freezing threshold temperature. This process, referred to as immersion freezing, is one of the modulators of aerosol-cloud…
We investigate the formation of cluster crystals with multiply occupied lattice sites on a spherical surface in systems of ultra-soft particles interacting via repulsive, bounded pair potentials. Not all interactions of this kind lead to…
We present a comprehensive review of the emerging crystal structure determination method Parameter Space Concept (PSC), which solves and refines either partial or complete crystal structures by mapping each experimental or theoretical…
We report on a novel and flexible experiment to investigate the non-equilibrium melting behaviour of model crystals made from charged colloidal spheres. In a slit geometry polycrystalline material formed in a low salt region is driven by…
We present a phase-field crystal (PFC) model for solidification that accounts for thermal transport and a temperature-dependent lattice parameter. Elasticity effects are characterized through the continuous elastic field computed from the…
The pronounced light-matter interactions in photonic crystals make them interesting as opto-fludic "building blocks" for lab-on-a-chip applications. We show how conducting electrolytes cause dissipation and smearing of the…
An algorithm for determining crystal structures from diffraction data is described which does not rely on the usual Fourier-space formulations of atomicity. The new algorithm implements atomicity constraints in real-space, as well as…