Related papers: Experimental studies of crystal nucleation: metals…
The growth of crystals confined in porous or cellular materials is ubiquitous in Nature and industry. Confinement affects the formation of biominerals in living organisms, of minerals in the Earth's crust and of salt crystals damaging…
Homogeneous nucleation of a new phase near a second, continuous, transition, is considered. The continuous transition is in the metastable region associated with the first-order phase transition, one of whose coexisting phases is…
Colloidal suspensions are simple model systems for the study of phase transitions. Video microscopy is capable of directly imaging the structure and dynamics of colloidal suspensions in different phases. Recent results related to…
Accurate predictions of thermo-mechanically coupled process in metals can lead to a reduction of cost and an increase of productivity in manufacturing processes such as forming. For modeling these coupled processes with the finite element…
Solidification control is crucial in manufacturing technologies, as it determines the microstructure and, consequently, the performance of the final product. Investigating the mechanisms occurring during the early stages of nucleation…
Despite the fundamental importance of solid--solid transitions for metallurgy, ceramics, earth science, reconfigurable materials, and colloidal matter, the details of how materials transform between two solid structures are poorly…
In alloy solidification, the transport processes of heat and solute result in morphological instability of the interface, forming different patterns of solidification structure and determining the mechanical properties of components. As the…
We present a phase field theory for binary crystal nucleation. In the one-component limit, quantitative agreement is achieved with computer simulations (Lennard-Jones system) and experiments (ice-water system) using model parameters…
An understanding of homogeneous nucleation of crystalline structure from a disordered medium such as a liquid remains an important unsolved problem in condensed matter physics. Guided by the results from a number of experiments on granular…
The solid diffusive phase transformation involving the nucleation and growth of one nucleus is universal and frequently employed but has not yet been fully understood at the atomic level. Here, our first-principles calculations reveal a…
We present a computer simulation study on the crystal nucleation process in suspensions of hard spheres, fully taking into account the solvent hydrodynamics. If the dynamics of collodial crystallization were purely diffusive, the crystal…
Control of physical behaviors of nematic colloids and colloidal crystals has been demonstrated by tuning particle shape, topology, chirality and surface charging. However, the capability of altering physical behaviors of such soft matter…
Condensation and boiling are phase transitions highly relevant to industry, geology or atmospheric science. These phase transitions are initiated by the nucleation of a drop in a supersaturated vapor and of a bubble in an overstretched…
We investigate a phase-field-crystal model for homogeneous nucleation. Instead of solving the time evolution of a density field towards equilibrium we use a String Method to identify saddle points in phase space. The saddle points allow to…
We present confocal microscopy studies of novel particle-stabilized emulsions. The novelty arises because the immiscible fluids have an accessible upper critical solution temperature. The emulsions have been created by beginning with…
Motivated by old experiments on colloidal suspensions, we report molecular dynamics simulations of assemblies of hard spheres, addressing crystallization and glass formation. The simulations cover wide ranges of polydispersity s (standard…
In this paper we have explored computationally the solidification process of large nickel clusters. This process has the characteristic features of the first order phase transition occurring in a finite system. The focus of our research is…
Nucleation in systems with a metastable liquid-gas critical point is the prototypical example of a two-step nucleation process, in which the appearance of the critical nucleus is preceded by the formation of a liquid-like density…
Despite its importance in atmospheric science, much remains unknown about the microscopic mechanism of heterogeneous ice nucleation. In this work, we perform hybrid Monte Carlo simulations of the heterogeneous nucleation of ice on a range…
Time crystals are nonequilibrium phases of matter characterized by the emergence of temporal ordering, in which an interacting many-body system develops robust structure in its time evolution that is not trivially dictated by the external…