Related papers: Crystal nucleation as the ordering of multiple ord…
Herein, fundamentals of topology and symmetry breaking are used to understand crystallization and geometrical frustration in topologically close-packed structures. This frames solidification from a new perspective that is unique from…
We review our recent modeling of crystal nucleation and polycrystalline growth using a phase field theory. First, we consider the applicability of phase field theory for describing crystal nucleation in a model hard sphere fluid. It is…
Colloidal model systems allow studying crystallization kinetics under fairly ideal conditions with rather well characterized pair interactions and minimized external influences. In complementary approaches therefore experiment, analytic…
A cascade of phase transitions from square to hexagonal lattice is studied in 2D system of particles interacting via core-softened potential. Due to the presence of two length-scales of repulsion, different local configurations with four,…
The succession of suggested mechanisms of solid-state phase transitions - Second-order, Lambda, Martensitic, Displacive, Topological, Order-Disorder, Soft-mode, Incommensurate, Scaling and Quantum - are analyzed and explained why they…
Studying the crystallization process of silicon is a challenging task since empirical potentials are not able to reproduce well the properties of both semiconducting solid and metallic liquid. On the other hand, nucleation is a rare event…
Crystallization from an amorphous atomic structure is usually seen as a spontaneous process in pursuit of a lower energy state, but for alloy systems it is often hard to elucidate because of the intrinsic structural and compositional…
Structural aspects of crystal nucleation in undercooled liquids are explored using a nonlinear hydrodynamic theory of crystallization proposed recently [G. I. Toth et al., J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 26, 055001 (2014)], which is based on…
The nucleation of a droplet of stable cylinder phase from a metastable lamellar phase is examined within the single-mode approximation to the Brazovskii model for diblock copolymer melts. By employing a variational ansatz for the droplet…
Nucleation is considered near the pseudospinodal in a one-dimensional $\phi^4$ model with a non-conserved order parameter and long-range interactions. For a sufficiently large system or a system with slow relaxation to metastable…
We review how phase-field models contributed to the understanding of various aspects of crystal nucleation including homogeneous and heterogeneous processes, and their role in microstructure evolution. We recall results obtained both by the…
It is demonstrated by analyzing real examples that phase transitions in layered crystals occur like all other solid-state phase transitions by nucleation and crystal growth, but have a specific morphology. There the nucleation is epitaxial,…
Nucleation processes, through which a new structure progressively forms within a pre-existing homogeneous phase, are fundamental in materials science, but are also typically non-trivial to elucidate. Cases in which to nucleate are defects…
The cubic blue phases of liquid crystals are fascinating and technologically promising examples of hierarchically structured soft materials, comprising ordered networks of defect lines (disclinations) within a liquid crystalline matrix. We…
We study a quasi-two-dimensional macroscopic system of magnetic spherical particles settled on a shallow concave dish under a temporally oscillating magnetic field. The system reaches a stationary state where the energy losses from…
In standard nucleation theory, the nucleation process is characterized by computing $\Delta\Omega(V)$, the reversible work required to form a cluster of volume $V$ of the stable phase inside the metastable mother phase. However, other…
A full understanding of polycrystalline materials requires studying the process of nucleation, a thermally activated phase transition that typically occurs at atomistic scales. The numerical modeling of this process is problematic for…
Control of the crystallization process at the microscopic level makes it possible to generate the nanocrystalline samples with the desired structural and morphological properties, that is of great importance for modern industry. In the…
Crystallization represents the prime example of a disorder order transition. In realistic situations, however, container walls and impurities are frequently present and hence crystallization is heterogeneously seeded. Rarely the seeds are…
Dynamical density functional simulations reveal structural aspects of crystal nucleation in undercooled liquids: the first appearing solid is amorphous, which promotes the nucleation of bcc crystals, but suppresses the appearance of the fcc…