Related papers: Phases of granular matter
Despite the ubiquitousness and technological and scientific importance of granular matter, our understanding is still very poor compared to molecular fluids and solids. Until today, there is no unified description, which indeed seems…
Granular materials are involved in most industrial and environmental processes, as well as many civil engineering applications. Although significant advances have been made in understanding the statics and dynamics of cohesionless grains…
Crystallization is one of the most important phase transformations of first order. In the case of metals and alloys, the liquid phase is the parent phase of materials production. The conditions of the crystallization process control the…
Years ago Edwards proposed a thermodynamic description of dense granular matter, in which the grains (the `atoms' of the system) interact with inelastic forces. The approach is intriguing but is not justified from first principles, and…
We present an experiment on crystallization of packings of macroscopic granular spheres. This system is often considered to be a model for thermally driven atomic or colloidal systems. Cyclically shearing a packing of frictional spheres, we…
We review how phase-field models contributed to the understanding of various aspects of crystal nucleation including homogeneous and heterogeneous processes, and their role in microstructure evolution. We recall results obtained both by the…
Colloidal model systems allow studying crystallization kinetics under fairly ideal conditions with rather well characterized pair interactions and minimized external influences. In complementary approaches therefore experiment, analytic…
When a system undergoes a transition from a liquid to a solid phase, it passes through multiple intermediate structures before reaching the final state. However, our knowledge on the exact pathways of this process is limited, mainly due to…
Homogeneous nucleation is formulated within the context of fluctuating hydrodynamics. It is shown that for a colloidal or macromolecular system in the strong damping limit the most likely path for nucleation can be determined by gradient…
Nucleation and growth (N&G) - the emergence of a new phase within an initially homogeneous one - is one of the most important physical phenomena by which gas-liquid, liquid-liquid and solid-liquid phase separation takes place. Accordingly,…
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…
The study of granular crystals, metamaterials that consist of closely packed arrays of particles that interact elastically, is a vibrant area of research that combines ideas from disciplines such as materials science, nonlinear dynamics,…
We review a few representative examples of granular experiments or models where phase separation, accompanied by domain coarsening, is a relevant phenomenon. We first elucidate the intrinsic non-equilibrium, or athermal, nature of granular…
We investigate sedimentation of model hard sphere-like colloidal dispersions confined in horizontal capillaries using laser scanning confocal microscopy, dynamical density functional theory, and Brownian dynamics computer simulations. For…
The interplay between crystal nucleation and the structure of the metastable fluid has been a topic of significant debate over recent years. In particular, it has been suggested that even in simple model systems such as hard or charged…
By detailed Molecular Dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations %of a realistic model we show that granular materials at rest can be described as thermodynamics systems. First we show that granular packs can be characterized by few parameters,…
The homogeneous partly pinned fluid systems are simple models of a fluid confined in a disordered porous matrix obtained by arresting randomly chosen particles in a one-component bulk fluid or one of the two components of a binary mixture.…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
Topological phases of matter are ubiquitous in crystals, but less is known about their existence in amorphous systems, that lack long-range order. In this perspective, we review the recent progress made on theoretically defining amorphous…
The linear hydrodynamic stability of a model for confined quasi-two-dimensional granular gases is analyzed. The system exhibits homogeneous hydrodynamics, i.e. there are macroscopic evolution equations for homogeneous states. The stability…