Related papers: Topological Control on Silicates Dissolution Kinet…
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.…
Controlling a state of material between its crystalline and glassy phase has fostered many real-world applications. Nevertheless, design rules for crystallization and vitrification kinetics still lack predictive power. Here, we identify…
Freestanding tubular crystals offer a general description of crystalline order on deformable surfaces with cylindrical topology, such as single-walled carbon nanotubes, microtubules, and recently reported colloidal assemblies. These systems…
Topological defects are one of the most conspicuous features of liquid crystals. In two dimensional nematics, they have been shown to behave effectively as particles with both, charge and orientation, which dictate their interactions. Here,…
The dissolution of NaCl in water is one of the most common everyday processes, yet it remains poorly understood at the molecular level. Here we report the results of an extensive density functional theory study in which the initial stages…
At low temperatures, dynamics in amorphous silicon occurs through a sequence of discrete activated events that locally reorganize the topological network. Using the activation-relaxation technique, a data base containing over 8000 such…
The past few years have witnessed the rapid development of liquid metal dealloying to fabricate nano-/meso-scale porous and composite structures with ultra-high interfacial area for diverse materials applications. However, this method…
Adhesion forces between submicrometer-sized silicate grains play a crucial role in the formation of silicate dust agglomerates, rocky planetesimals, and terrestrial planets. The surface energy of silicate dust particles is the key to their…
The dynamics of active smectic liquid crystals confined on a spherical surface is explored through an active phase field crystal model. Starting from an initially randomly perturbed isotropic phase, several types of topological defects are…
The dissolution of porous materials in a flow field shapes the morphologies of many geologic landscapes. Identifying the dissolution front, the interface between the reactive and the unreactive regions in a dissolving medium, is a…
Soda-lime-silica is a glassy system of strong industrial interest. In order to characterize its liquid state properties, we performed molecular dynamics simulations employing an aspherical ion model that includes atomic polarization and…
The effects of thermal coupling between two thin liquid layers, separated by a gas layer, are discussed. The liquid layers undergo long-wavelength instabilities driven by gravitational and thermocapillary stresses. To study the dynamics,…
Silica is the paradigmatic network glass-former and understanding its response to pressure is essential for comprehending the mechanical properties of silica-based materials and the behavior of silicate melts in the Earth's interior. While…
Liquid shells (e.g. double emulsions, vesicles etc.) are susceptible to interfacial instability and rupturing when driven out of mechanical equilibrium. This poses a significant challenge for the design of liquid shell based micro-machines,…
Catalyst particles or complexes suspended in liquid films can trigger chemical reactions leading to inhomogeneous concentrations of reactants and products in the film. We demonstrate that the sensitivity of the liquid film's gas-liquid…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
We have studied the diffusion inside the silica network of sodium atoms initially located outside the surfaces of an amorphous silica film. We have focused our attention on structural and dynamical quantities, and we have found that the…
Topological properties of crystalline ice structures are studied by considering ring statistics, coordination sequences, and topological density of different ice phases. The coordination sequences (number of sites at topological distance k…
Dispersing small particles in a liquid can produce surprising behaviors when the solids fraction becomes large: rapid shearing drives these systems out of equilibrium and can lead to dramatic increases in viscosity (shear-thickening) or…