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Sodium chloride (NaCl), or rocksalt, is well characterized at ambient pressure. Due to the large electronegativity difference between Na and Cl atoms, it has highly ionic chemical bonding, with stoichiometry 1:1 dictated by charge balance,…
Serpentine minerals are important components of metamorphic rocks and promising geo-materials for nanotechnology. Lizardite, the most abundant serpentine mineral, can be transformed into chlorite during metamorphism. This intriguing phase…
We investigate ice polyamorphism in the context of the two-dimensional Mercedes-Benz model of water. We find a first-order phase transition between a crystalline phase and a high-density amorphous phase. Furthermore we find a reversible…
The growing sluggishness of glass-forming liquids is thought to be accompanied by growing structural order. The nature of such order, however, remains hotly debated. A decade ago, point-to-set (PTS) correlation lengths were proposed as…
Enhancement of thermal performance of concrete wall is nowadays of great importance in reducing the operational energy demand of buildings. We developed a new kind of inorganic coating material based on \ce{SiO2}-\ce{Al2O3}-rich minerals…
We present a phase diagram for water confined to cylindrical silica nanopores in terms of pressure, temperature and pore radius. The confining cylindrical wall is hydrophilic and disordered, which has a destabilizing effect on ordered water…
The exploration of solid-solid phase transition suffers from the uncertainty of how atoms in two crystal structures match. We devised a theoretical framework to describe and classify crystal-structure matches (CSM). Such description fully…
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,…
The glass transition is considered as a phase transition in the system of topologically protected excitations in matter structure. The critical behavior of the system is considered both in statics and dynamics cases. It is shown in the…
Experimental DSC and Avrami curves for the crystallization of metallic glasses demonstrate nucleation at grain boundaries and thus indicate their grain structure, which refutes the generally accepted idea of glass as a homogeneous frozen…
Faced with the Kauzmann paradox, glasses have always been a puzzle for condensed matter theorists. We show that in a new picture of condensed matter, which takes into account the coherent interaction mechanisms of QED, glasses are nothing…
Of the many different kinds of glassy states found in nature, spin glasses and structural glasses (e.g. normal window glass) have probably received the most attention. One of the central questions concerning the glassy state is whether the…
Assemblies of nanocrystals with complex morphologies have solicited great scientific interest. Controlling the formation of these self-assembled structures has proved difficult. Here we present a novel transformation reaction for…
We present new atomistic models of amorphous silicon (a-Si) and hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) surfaces. The a-Si model included 4096 atoms and was obtained using local orbital density functional theory. By analyzing a slab model…
An open question is whether the liquid and glassy phases of water are thermodynamically distinct or continuous. Here we address this question using molecular dynamics simulations in comparison with neutron scattering experiments to study…
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…
When flat or on a firm mechanical substrate, the atomic composition and atomistic structure of two-dimensional crystals dictate their chemical, electronic, optical, and mechanical properties. These properties change when the two-dimensional…
Theoretical challenges in understanding the nature of glass and the glass transition remain significant open questions in statistical and condensed matter physics. As a prototypical example of complex physical systems, glasses and the…
The very nature of glass is somewhat mysterious: while relaxation times in glasses are of sufficient magnitude that large-scale motion on the atomic level is essentially as slow as it is in the crystalline state, the structure of glass…
As a nontrivial solid state of matter, the glassy-crystal state embraces physical features of both crystalline and amorphous solids, where a long-range ordered periodic structure formed by the mass centers of constituent molecules…