Related papers: From Crystals to Disordered Crystals: A Hidden Ord…
Time crystals are physical systems whose time translation symmetry is spontaneously broken. Although the spontaneous breaking of continuous time-translation symmetry in static systems is proved impossible for the equilibrium state, the…
Ordered phases on curved substrates experience a complex interplay of ordering and intrinsic curvature, commonly producing frustration and singularities. This is an especially important issue in crystals as ever-smaller scale materials are…
Freezing of charged colloids on square or triangular two-dimensional periodic substrates has been recently shown to realize a rich variety of orientational orders. We propose a theoretical framework to analyze the corresponding structures.…
A wide range of disordered materials, from biological to geological assemblies, feature discrete elements undergoing large shape changes. How significant geometrical variations at the microscopic scale affect the response of the assembly,…
The dynamic transition between the ordered flow and the plastic flow is studied for a two-dimensional driven vortex lattice, in the presence of sharp and dense pinning centers, from numerical simulations. For this system, which does not…
Structural defects in a crystal are responsible for the "two length-scale" behavior, in which a sharp central peak is superimposed over a broad peak in critical diffuse X-ray scattering. We have previously measured the scaling behavior of…
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…
We report on a non-equilibrium phase of matter, the minimally disordered crystal phase, which we find exists between the maximally amorphous glasses and the ideal crystal. Even though these near crystals appear highly ordered, they display…
We develop a real space renormalisation group analysis of disordered models of glasses, in particular of the spin models at the origin of the Random First Order Transition theory. We find three fixed points respectively associated to the…
Time crystals are quantum many-body systems which are able to self-organize their motion in a periodic way in time. Discrete time crystals have been experimentally demonstrated in spin systems. However, the first idea of spontaneous…
I review some of the properties of a Wigner crystal of electrons in two dimensional systems. The effect of disorder on such quantum crystals is discussed. The question of compressibility of such systems as obtained from capacitance…
When strained beyond the linear regime, soft colloidal glasses yield to steady-state plastic flow in a way that is similar to the deformation of conventional amorphous solids. Due to the much larger size of the colloidal particles with…
Using Brownian dynamics computer simulations we show that a two-dimensional suspension of self-propelled ("active") colloidal particles crystallizes at sufficiently high densities. Compared to the equilibrium freezing of passive particles…
The transition to turbulence is characterized by an abrupt loss of order and predictability, featuring the intermittent proliferation and decay of localized turbulent structures. En-route to becoming fully turbulent, surprisingly order…
Inhomogeneous phases may appear when a stress is applied to a system and the system can minimize the free energy breaking the rotational invariance. Various examples are known in Nature of this sort, as the paramagnetic to ferromagnetic…
Amorphous materials as diverse as foams, emulsions, colloidal suspensions and granular media can jam into a rigid, disordered state where they withstand finite shear stresses before yielding. Here we review the current understanding of the…
We study incompressible systems of motile particles with alignment interactions. Unlike their compressible counterparts, in which the order-disorder (i.e., moving to static) transition, tuned by either noise or number density, is…
In this work we consider bubbles that can form spontaneously when a two-dimensional (2D) crystal is transferred to a substrate with gases or liquids trapped at the crystal-substrate interface. The underlying mechanics may be described by a…
We explore the non-equilibrium dissipative dynamics of a system of identical charged particles trapped on a closed helix. The particles are subject to an external force accelerating them along the underlying structure. The effective…
We use numerical simulations to study the crystallization of monodisperse systems of hard aspherical particles. We find that particle shape and crystallizability can be easily related to each other when particles are characterized in terms…