Related papers: Nucleation in sheared granular matter
Understanding the pathways to crystallization during the deposition of a vapor phase on a cold solid substrate is of great interest in industry, e.g., for the realization of electronic devices made of crystallites-free glassy materials, as…
The interplay between densification and positional ordering during the process of crystal nucleation is a greatly investigated topic. Even for the simplest colloidal model -- hard spheres -- there has been much debate regarding 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…
We address the crystallization of monodisperse hard spheres in terms of the properties of finite- size crystalline clusters. By means of large scale event-driven Molecular Dynamics simulations, we study systems at different packing…
One of the most ubiquitous and technologically important phenomena in nature is the nucleation of homogeneous flowing systems. The microscopic effects of shear on a nucleating system are still imperfectly understood, although in recent…
A granular system confined in a quasi two-dimensional box that is vertically vibrated can transit to an absorbing state in which all particles bounce vertically in phase with the box, with no horizontal motion. In principle, this state can…
Many experiments over the past half century have shown that, for a range of protocols, granular materials compact under pressure and repeated small disturbances. A recent experiment on cyclically sheared spherical grains showed significant…
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…
The phase behavior of helical packings of thermoresponsive microspheres inside glass capillaries is studied as a function of volume fraction. Stable packings with long-range orientational order appear to evolve abruptly to disordered states…
Recent advances in classical density functional theory are combined with stochastic process theory and rare event techniques to formulate a theoretical description of nucleation, including crystallization, that can predict nonclassical…
The basic physics of nucleation in solid \hl{single-crystal} nanoparticles is revealed by a phase-field theory that includes surface energy, chemical reactions and coherency strain. In contrast to binary fluids, which form arbitrary contact…
We study the effect of shear flow on homogeneous crystal nucleation, using Brownian Dynamics simulations in combination with an umbrella sampling like technique. The symmetry breaking due to shear results in anisotropic radial distribution…
Combining three numerical methods (forward flux sampling, seeding of droplets, and finite size droplets), we probe the crystallization of hard spheres over the full range from close to coexistence to the spinodal regime. We show that all…
Heterogeneous nucleation is central to many familiar first-order phase transitions such as the freezing of water and the solidification of metals, and it can also play a crucial role in cosmology. We examine nucleation seeded by preexisting…
Packing problems have been a source of fascination for millenia and their study has produced a rich literature that spans numerous disciplines. Investigations of hard-particle packing models have provided basic insights into the structure…
Nucleation plays a critical role in many physical and biological phenomena ranging from crystallization, melting and evaporation to the formation of clouds and the initiation of neurodegenerative diseases. However, nucleation is a…
We study the nucleation of nearly-hard charged colloidal particles. We use Monte Carlo simulations in combination with free-energy calculations to accurately predict the phase diagrams of these particles and map them via the freezing…
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…
The crystallization of a metastable melt is one of the most important non equilibrium phenomena in condensed matter physics, and hard sphere colloidal model systems have been used for several decades to investigate this process by…
A recently formulated description of homogeneous nucleation for Brownian particles in the over-damped limit based on fluctuating hydrodynamics is used to determine the nucleation pathway, characterized as the most likely path (MLP), for the…