Related papers: Controlling the crystal polymorph by exploiting th…
Over the past two decades, a large number of studies addressed the topic of crystal nucleation in suspensions of hard spheres. The shared result of all these efforts is that, at low super-saturations, experimentally observed nucleation…
The ability to predict the morphology of crystals formed by chemical reactions is of fundamental importance for the shape-controlled synthesis of nanostructures. Based on the atomistic mechanism for crystal growth under different driving…
Atom arrangement plays a critical role in determining material properties. It is, therefore, essential for materials science and engineering to identify and characterize distinct atom configurations. Currently, crystal structures can be…
Crystallization of supersaturated liquids usually starts by heterogeneous nucleation. Mounting evidence shows that even homogeneous nucleation in simple liquids takes place in two steps; first a dense amorphous precursor forms, and the…
Finding an optimal match between two different crystal structures underpins many important materials science problems, including describing solid-solid phase transitions, developing models for interface and grain boundary structures. In…
Crystallization is a fundamental process in materials science, providing the primary route for the realization of a wide range of new materials. Crystallization rates are also considered to be useful probes of glass-forming ability. At the…
We developed a rapid polymorphic screening approach based on contracting sessile microdroplets which offers several advantages: (1) achieves very high supersaturation to facilitate formation of metastable forms (2) allows systematic…
We introduce a computational method to discover polymorphs in molecular crystals at finite temperature. The method is based on reproducing the crystallization process starting from the liquid and letting the system discover the relevant…
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…
The crystal size distribution in polynuclear growth is numerically studied using a coupled map lattice model. The width of the size distribution depends on c/D, where c is the growth rate at interface sites and $D$ is the diffusion…
In this paper, we investigate a stochastic model describing the time evolution of a polymerization process. A polymer is a macro-molecule resulting from the aggregation of several elementary sub-units called monomers. Polymers can grow by…
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…
Nucleation and growth of crystal in an oxide glass was studied in a Si B Al Zr Nd Ca Na O system. The nucleation and growth process was monitored by thermal analysis and isothermal experiments. For the Ca sample the crystallization is…
Unlike atoms, colloidal particles are not identical, but can only be synthesised within a finite size tolerance. Colloids are therefore polydisperse, i.e. mixtures of infinitely many components with sizes drawn from a continuous…
We study the spontaneous nucleation and crystallization of linear and cyclic chains of flexibly connected hard spheres using extensive molecular dynamics simulations. To this end, we present a novel event-driven molecular dynamics…
Nucleation of a new phase almost always starts at a surface. This surface is almost always assumed not to change with time. However, surfaces can roughen, partially dissolve and change chemically with time. Each of these irreversible…
Crystalline materials can form different structural arrangements (i.e. polymorphs) with the same chemical composition, exhibiting distinct physical properties depending on how they were synthesized or the conditions under which they…
The ability to reliably predict the structures and stabilities of a molecular crystal and its polymorphs without any prior experimental information would be an invaluable tool for a number of fields, with specific and immediate applications…
Based on classical nucleation theory, we propose a couple of theoretical models for the nucleation of polymer crystallization, i.e. one for a single chain system (Model S) and the other for a multi-chain system (Model M). In these models,…
Recent observations of the growth of protein crystals have identified two different growth regimes. At low supersaturation, the surface of the crystal is smooth and increasing in size due to the nucleation of steps at defects and the…