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We investigate the characteristic length scales associated with the glass transition phenomenon. By studying an atomic glass-forming liquid in negatively curved space, for which the local order is well identified and the amount of…
Using molecular dynamics simulations, with a realistic many-body embedded-atom potential, and a novel method to characterize local order, we study the structure of pure nickel during the rapid quench of the liquid and in the resulting…
Due to the peculiar non-fermi liquid of one dimensional systems, disorder has particularly strong effects. We show that such systems belong to the more general class of disordered quantum solids. We discuss the physics of such disordered…
The phase transition of a fluid adsorbed in a heterogeneous system is studied with two simple lattice gas models within the framework of a mean-field theory. Despite the different origin of the heterogeneity (spatial variation of binding…
Liquid electrolytes adsorbed at the surface of metallic electrodes display a multitude of structures that can largely differ from the parent bulk system, both in terms of composition and local organization. In particular, the existence of…
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…
The liquid-to-ordered phase transition in a bilayer system of fermions is studied within the context of a recently proposed density-functional theory [Phys. Rev. A {\bf 92}, 023614 (2015)]. In each two-dimensional layer, the fermions…
We compare the heat release data of organic glasses with that of amorphous and glass like crystalline solids. Anomalous behavior was found in all these materials, which disagrees with the standard tunneling model. We can explain the most of…
Apart from not having crystallized, supercooled liquids can be considered as being properly equilibrated and thus can be described by a few thermodynamic control variables. In contrast, glasses and other amorphous solids can be arbitrarily…
We investigate the phase diagram of a two-component associating fluid mixture in the presence of selectively adsorbing substrates. The mixture is characterized by a bulk phase diagram which displays peculiar features such as closed loops of…
What characterises a solid is its way to respond to external stresses. Ordered solids, such crystals, display an elastic regime followed by a plastic one, both well understood microscopically in terms of lattice distortion and dislocations.…
Liquid-liquid phase separation has recently emerged as an important topic in the context of cellular organization. Within this context, there are multiple poorly understood features; for instance hints of critical behavior in the plasma…
A novel pattern forming instability in a mixture of a granular material and water in a horizontal rotating drum is experimentally investigated. The particles accumulate in radial symmetric rings separated by pure water. The transition…
A progress report on two recent theoretical approaches proposed to understand the physics of irreversible fractal aggregates showing up a structural transition from a rather dense to a more multibranched growth is presented. In the first…
We describe an experimental and computational investigation of the ordered and disordered phases of a vibrating thin, dense granular layer composed of identical metal spheres. We compare the results from spheres with different amounts of…
Understanding and controlling the director field configuration, shape, and orientation in nematic and cholesteric liquid crystals is of fundamental importance in several branches of science. Liquid crystalline droplets, also known as…
We study the geometrical features of the order parameter's fluctuations near the critical point of mixed-order phase transitions in randomly interdependent spatial networks. In contrast to continuous transitions, where the structure of the…
A previously developed fundamental measure fucntional [J. Chem. Phys. vol.107, 6379 (1997)] is used to study the phase behavior of a system of parallel hard cubes. The single-component fluid exhibits a continuous transition to a solid with…
Recent theoretical studies predict that structural disorder, serving as a bridge connecting a crystalline material to an amorphous material, can induce a topological insulator from a trivial phase. However, to experimentally observe such a…
We use a continuum, two-fluid approach to study a mixture of two active nematic fluids. Even in the absence of thermodynamically-driven ordering, for mixtures of different activities we observe turbulent microphase separation, where domains…