Related papers: Heterogeneous nucleation on a surface with heterog…
Hard-sphere model systems are well-suited in both experiment and simulations to investigate fundamental aspects of the crystallization of fluids. In experiments on colloidal models of hard-sphere fluids, the uid is unavoidably at contact…
An analytical model for the evolution of the boundary of the new phase in transformations ruled by nucleation and growth is presented. Both homogeneous and heterogeneous nucleation have been considered: The former includes transformations…
Coarse grained molecular dynamics simulations are presented in which the sensitivity of the ice nucleation rate to the hydrophilicity of a graphene nanoflake is investigated. We find that an optimal interaction strength for promoting ice…
Computer simulations are employed to investigate the adsorption mechanisms of ethane on both homogeneous and inhomogeneous substrates. For homogeneous surfaces, the full range of surface phase transitions - from incomplete to complete…
First order phase transitions proceed via nucleation. The rate of nucleation varies exponentially with the free-energy barrier to nucleation, and so is highly sensitive to variations in this barrier. In practice, very few systems are…
Heterogeneous nucleation at surface edges is pervasive across nature and industry, yet the role of line tension, arising from asymmetric capillary interactions at geometric singularities, remains poorly understood. Herein we develop a…
We investigate connections between the continuum and atomistic descriptions of deformable crystals, using certain interesting results from number theory. The energy of a deformed crystal is calculated in the context of a lattice model with…
When solid surfaces are immersed in aqueous solutions, some of their charges can dissociate and leave behind charge patches on the surface. Although the charges are distributed heterogeneously on the surface, most of the theoretical models…
As proteins typically have charges of around 10, they will interact strongly with charged surfaces. We calculate the electrostatic contribution to the interaction of crystals of protein with charged surfaces. The surfaces repel like-charged…
A consistent treatment of the coupling of surface energy and elasticity within the multi-phase- field framework is presented. The model accurately reproduces stress distribution in a number of analytically tractable, yet non-trivial, cases…
The thermodynamics of strongly anisotropic crystalline surfaces is analogous to that of a binary mixture exhibiting phase separation. On a metastable planar surface, formation of stable orientations requires a nucleation process, in which…
An energy for first-order structured deformations in the context of periodic homogenization is obtained. This energy, defined in principle by relaxation of an initial energy of integral type featuring contributions of bulk and interfacial…
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. It is also the lightest and as such the most quantum of the elements, in the sense that quantum tunnelling, quantum delocalisation, and zero-point motion can be important. For practical…
In the study of colloidal, biological and electrochemical systems, it is customary to treat surfaces, macromolecules and electrodes as homogeneously charged. This simplified approach is proven successful in most cases, but fails to describe…
We study the global influence of curvature on the free energy landscape of two-dimensional binary mixtures confined on closed surfaces. Starting from a generic effective free energy, constructed on the basis of symmetry considerations and…
Investigating atom-surface interactions is the key to an in-depth understanding of chemical processes at interfaces, which are of central importance in many fields -- from heterogeneous catalysis to corrosion. In this work, we present a…
The variation of energies associated with soft matter interfaces where surface inhomogeneities are present. These energies include the total bending and splay energy, the variable surface tension energy, a coupling energy between the total…
The formation energy of a solid surface can be extracted from slab calculations if the bulk energy per atom is known. It has been pointed out previously that the resulting surface energy will diverge with slab thickness if the bulk energy…
Screening effects of electrons on inhomogeneous nuclear matter, which includes spherical, slablike, and rodlike nuclei as well as spherical and rodlike nuclear bubbles, are investigated in view of possible application to cold neutron star…
Realistic fluid-solid interaction potentials are essential in description of confined fluids especially in the case of geometric heterogeneous surfaces. Correlated random field is considered as a model of random surface with high geometric…