Related papers: Polymorph selection during crystallization of a mo…
Understanding polymorph selection in atomic and molecular systems and its control through thermodynamic conditions and external factors (such as seed characteristics) is fundamental to the design of targeted materials and holds great…
We study polymorph selection in a model of charged colloids, with a focus on the higher-order structure prior to and during nucleation. Specifically, we carry out molecular dynamics simulations of a repulsive Yukawa system with a slightly…
Nucleation plays a critical role in the birth of crystals and is associated with a vast array of phenomena such as protein crystallization and ice formation in clouds. Despite numerous experimental and theoretical studies, many aspects 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 report simulations on the homogeneous liquid-fcc nucleation of charged colloids for both low and high contact energy values. As a precursor for crystal formation, we observe increased local order at the position where the crystal will…
We investigate the kinetics and the free energy landscape of the crystallization of hard spheres from a supersaturated metastable liquid though direct simulations and forward flux sampling. In this first paper, we describe and test two…
Crystallization in a dense suspension of anisotropic spherical colloidal particles with a Yukawa potential is numerically investigated in a two-dimensional plane. It is found that a strong anisotropy can hinder the particles from…
We have studied a model of a complex fluid consisting of particles interacting through a hard core and a short range attractive potential of both Yukawa and square-well form. Using a hybrid method, including a self-consistent and quite…
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…
We show that the interplay between excluded volume effects, hydrophobicity, and hydrogen bonding of a tube-like representation of a polypeptide chain gives rise to free energy landscapes that exhibit a small number of metastable minima…
We consider homogeneous crystallisation rates in confocal microscopy experiments on colloidal nearly hard spheres at the single particle level. These we compare with Brownian dynamics simuations by carefully modelling the softness in the…
A free-energy functional for a crystal that contains both the symmetry conserved and symmetry broken parts of the direct pair correlation function is developed. The free-energy functional is used to investigate the crystallization of fluids…
The interfacial free energy is a central quantity in crystallization from the meta-stable melt. In suspensions of charged colloidal spheres, nucleation and growth kinetics can be accurately measured from optical experiments. In previous…
Nucleation is an activated process in which the system has to overcome a free energy barrier in order for a first-order phase transition between the metastable and the stable phases to take place. In the liquid-to-solid transition the…
We investigate crystal nucleation in supersaturated colloid suspensions using enhanced molecular dynamics simulations augmented with machine learning techniques. The simulations reveal that crystallization in the model colloidal system…
We investigate bulk thermodynamic and microscopic structural properties of amorphous solids in the framework of the phase-field crystal (PFC) model. These are metastable states with a non-uniform density distribution having no long-range…
Modulating liquid-to-solid transitions and the resulting crystalline structure for tailored properties is much desired. Colloidal systems are exemplary to this end, but the fundamental knowledge gaps in relating the influence of…
Metastable polymorphs often result from the interplay between thermodynamics and kinetics. Despite advances in predictive synthesis for solution-based techniques, there remains a lack of methods to design solid-state reactions targeting…
We recently found that crystallization of monodisperse hard spheres from the bulk fluid faces a much higher free energy barrier in four than in three dimensions at equivalent supersaturation, due to the increased geometrical frustration…
We systematically study the relationship between equilibrium and non-equilibrium phase diagrams of a system of short-ranged attractive colloids. Using Monte Carlo and Brownian dynamics simulations we find a window of enhanced…