Related papers: Nucleation on a sphere: the roles of curvature, co…
Nucleation and growth is the dominant relaxation mechanism driving first order phase transitions. In two-dimensional at systems nucleation has been applied to a wide range of problems in physics, chemistry and biology. Here we study…
We investigate the morphology of a toroidal fluid membrane vesicle confined inside a spherical container. The equilibrium shapes are assembled in a geometrical phase diagram as a function of scaled area and reduced volume of the membrane.…
The advances in cold atom experiments have allowed construction of confining traps in the form of curved surfaces. This opens up the possibility of studying quantum gases in curved manifolds. On closed surfaces, many fundamental processes…
For particles confined to two dimensions, any curvature of the surface affects the structural, kinetic and thermodynamic properties of the system. If the curvature is non-uniform, an even richer range of behaviours can emerge. Using a…
We study elasticity-driven morphological transitions of soft spherical core shell structures in which the core can be treated as an isotropic elastic continuum and the surface or shell as a tensionless liquid layer, whose elastic response…
Monte Carlo simulations of crystal nuclei coexisting with the fluid phase in thermal equilibrium in finite volumes are presented and analyzed, for fluid densities from dense melts to the vapor. Generalizing the lever-rule for two-phase…
Although impurities are unavoidable in real-world and experimental systems, most numerical studies on nucleation focus on pure (impurity-free) systems. As a result, the role of impurities in phase transitions remains poorly understood,…
The bending energy of any freely deformable closed surface is quadratic in its curvature. In the absence of constraints, it will be minimized when the surface adopts the form of a round sphere. If the surface is confined within a…
Confinement can have a dramatic effect on the behavior of all sorts of particulate systems and it therefore is an important phenomenon in many different areas of physics and technology. Here, we investigate the role played by the softness…
Colloid or nanoparticle mobility under confinement is of central importance to a wide range of physical and biological processes. Here, we introduce a minimal model of particles in a hydrodynamic continuum to examine how particle shape and…
We study the global influence of curvature on the free energy landscape of two-dimensional binary mixtures confined on closed surfaces. Starting from a generic effective free energy, constructed on the basis of symmetry considerations and…
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…
We investigate the energetics of droplets sourced by the thermal fluctuations in a system undergoing a first-order transition. In particular, we confine our studies to two dimensions with explicit calulations in the plane and on the sphere.…
We study crystal nucleation under the influence of sedimentation in a model of colloidal hard spheres via Brownian Dynamics simulations. We introduce two external fields acting on the colloidal fluid: a uniform gravitational field (body…
What are the mechanisms leading to the shape relaxation of three dimensional crystallites ? Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of fcc clusters show that the usual theories of equilibration, via atomic surface diffusion driven by curvature, are…
We use grand canonical transition-matrix Monte Carlo and discontinuous molecular dynamics simulations to generate precise thermodynamic and kinetic data for the equilibrium hard-sphere fluid confined between smooth hard walls. These…
The shape assumed by a slender elastic structure is a function both of the geometry of the space in which it exists and the forces it experiences. We explore by experiments and theoretical analysis, the morphological phase-space of a…
In many biological systems, the curvature of the surfaces cells live on influence their collective properties. Curvature should likewise influence the behavior of active colloidal particles. We show using molecular simulation of…
Phase diagrams of some globular proteins have a fluid-fluid transition as well as a fluid-crystal transition. Homogeneous nucleation of the crystal from the fluid phase near the critical point of the fluid-fluid transition is examined. As…
The structure of finite self-assembling systems depends sensitively on the number of constituent building blocks. Recently, it was demonstrated that hard sphere-like colloidal particles show a magic number effect when confined in spherical…