Related papers: Controlling the crystal polymorph by exploiting th…

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…

When a system is brought to a metastable state, nuclei of the equilibrium phase form and grow. This is the well-known nucleation and growth of first-order phase transitions. Near a critical point of a continuous phase transition, critical…

We present a dynamical model of crystal growth, in which it is possible to reliably achieve asymmetric products, beginning from symmetric initial conditions and growing within an isotropic environment. The asymmetric growth is the result of…

Polymorphism rationalizes how processing can control the final structure of a material. The rugged free-energy landscape and exceedingly slow kinetics in the solid state have so far hampered computational investigations. We report for the…

We present results from density functional theory and computer simulations that unambiguously predict the occurrence of first-order freezing transitions for a large class of ultrasoft model systems into cluster crystals. The clusters…

Germanium is the base element in many phase-change materials, i.e. systems that can undergo reversible transformations between their crystalline and amorphous phases. They are widely used in current digital electronics and hold great…

The phase-field model for the description of the solidification processes with the glass-crystal competition is suggested. The model combines the first-order phase transition model in the phase-field formalism and gauge-field theory of…

Ongoing surveys are in the process of measuring the chemical abundances in large numbers of stars, with the ultimate goal of reconstructing the formation history of the Milky Way using abundances as tracers. However, interpretation of these…

The ability to control the crystallization behaviour (including its absence) of particles, be they biomolecules such as globular proteins, inorganic colloids, nanoparticles, or metal atoms in an alloy, is of both fundamental and…

We study reversible polymerization of rings. In this stochastic process, two monomers bond and as a consequence, two disjoint rings may merge into a compound ring, or, a single ring may split into two fragment rings. This…

Almost all young stars are found in multiple systems. This suggests that protostellar cores almost always fragment into multiple objects. The observed properties of multiple systems such as their separation distribution and mass ratios…

Crystallization is a key step in macromolecular structure determination by crystallography. While a robust theoretical treatment of the process is available, due to the complexity of the system, the experimental process is still largely one…

Understanding the underlying mechanism of crystal nucleation during solidification is a fundamental aspect in the prediction and control of materials properties. Classical nucleation theory (CNT) assumes that homogeneous nucleation occurs…

Molecular and polymeric crystals show a wide range of functional properties that arise from the interplay between the atomic-scale structure of their constituent molecules and the organization of these molecules within the crystal lattice…

We report on a large scale computer simulation study of crystal nucleation in hard spheres. Through a combined analysis of real and reciprocal space data, a picture of a two-step crystallization process is supported: First dense, amorphous…

Crystal structures can be viewed as assemblies of space-filling polyhedra, which play a critical role in determining material properties such as ionic conductivity and dielectric constant. However, most conventional crystal structure…

Motivated by recent experiments on colloidal systems with competing attractive and repulsive interactions, we simulate a two-dimensional system of colloids with competing interactions that can undergo fragmentation. In the absence of any…

Pattern forming systems allow for a wealth of states, where wavelengths and orientation of patterns varies and defects disrupt patches of monocrystalline regions. Growth of patterns has long been recognized as a strong selection mechanism.…

Crystallisation is an important phenomenon which facilitates the purification as well as structural and bulk phase material characterisation using crystallographic methods. However, different conditions can lead to a vast set of different…

Accurate calculations of the nucleation rate $\Gamma$ for first order phase transitions are important for determining their observable consequences in particle physics and cosmology. Perturbative calculations are often used, but they are…