Related papers: Crystal Nucleation in Liquids: Open Questions and …
Although liquid water is ubiquitous in chemical reactions at roots of life and climate on the earth, the prediction of its properties by high-level ab initio molecular dynamics simulations still represents a formidable task for quantum…
Scientific computing applications have benefited greatly from high performance computing infrastructure such as supercomputers. However, we are seeing a paradigm shift in the computational structure, design, and requirements of these…
Machine learning (ML) is transforming all areas of science. The complex and time-consuming calculations in molecular simulations are particularly suitable for a machine learning revolution and have already been profoundly impacted by the…
Nucleation, commonly associated with discontinuous transformations between metastable and stable phases, is crucial in fields as diverse as atmospheric science and nanoscale electronics. Traditionally, it is considered a microscopic process…
Liquid crystal is a typical kind of soft matter that is intermediate between crystalline solids and isotropic fluids. The study of liquid crystals has made tremendous progress over the last four decades, which is of great importance on both…
Using state-of-the-art rare-event sampling simulations, we precisely characterize the nucleation of liquid droplets from a supersaturated Lennard-Jones gas and uncover a key physical feature: critical clusters nucleate with a density that…
Colloidal systems offer the ideal conditions to study the nucleation process, both from an experimental viewpoint, due to their relative large size and long time-scales, and from a modeling point of view, due to the tunability of their…
Over times shorter than that required for relaxation of enthalpy, a liquid can exhibit striking heterogeneities. The picture of these heterogeneities is complex with transient patches of rigidity, irregular yet persistent, intersected by…
Practical challenges in simulating quantum systems on classical computers have been widely recognized in the quantum physics and quantum chemistry communities over the past century. Although many approximation methods have been introduced,…
Crystallization is a process of great practical relevance in which rare but crucial fluctuations lead to the formation of a solid phase starting from the liquid. Like in all first order first transitions there is an interplay between…
We describe here in detail the recently introduced methodology for simulation of structural transitions in crystals. The applications of the new scheme are illustrated on various kinds of crystals and the advantages with respect to previous…
The distribution of chemical elements in the hot intracluster medium (ICM) retains valuable information about the enrichment and star formation histories of galaxy clusters, and on the feedback and dynamical processes driving the evolution…
We have performed large-scale Lennard-Jones molecular dynamics simulations of homogeneous vapor-to-liquid nucleation, with $10^9$ atoms. This large number allows us to resolve extremely low nucleation rates, and also provides excellent…
Over the last number of years several simulation methods have been introduced to study rare events such as nucleation. In this paper we examine the crystal nucleation rate of hard spheres using three such numerical techniques: molecular…
Crystal growth and crystal coalescence processes in supercooled systems strongly depend on the concentration of crystallization centers. We perform atomistic dynamics simulations of the crystallization process in the ultrathin metallic film…
When an ice crystal is born from liquid water two key changes occur: (i) the molecules order; and (ii) the mobility of the molecules drops as they adopt their lattice positions. Most research on ice nucleation (and crystallization in…
The physics of glasses can be studied from many viewpoints, from material scientists interested in the development of new materials to statistical physicists inventing new theoretical tools to deal with disordered systems. In these lectures…
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…
Ice nucleation is greatly important in areas as diverse as climate change, cryobiology, geology or food industry. Predicting the ability of a substrate to induce the nucleation of ice from supercooled water is a difficult problem. Here, we…
A recent description of diffusion-limited nucleation based on fluctuating hydrodynamics that extends classical nucleation theory predicts a very non-classical two-step scenario whereby nucleation is most likely to occur in…