Related papers: Phases of granular matter
The non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and kinetic theory for a model of a confined quasi-two-dimensional gas of inelastic hard spheres is presented. The dynamics of the particles includes an effective mechanism to transfer the energy…
What are topological phases of matter? First, they are phases of matter at zero temperature. Second, they have a non-zero energy gap for the excitations above the ground state. Third, they are disordered liquids that seem have no feature.…
Unlike fluids at thermal equilibrium, biomolecular mixtures in living systems can sustain nonequilibrium steady states, in which active processes modify the conformational states of the constituent molecules. Despite qualitative…
We have made pressure and NMR measurements during the evolution of phase separation in solid helium isotopic mixtures. Our observations indicate clearly all three stages of the homogeneous nucleation - growth process: 1) creation of…
It is known that a finite-size homogeneous granular fluid develops an hydrodynamic-like instability when dissipation crosses a threshold value. This instability is analyzed in terms of modified hydrodynamic equations: first, a source term…
Forced granular matter in confined geometries presents phase transitions and coexistence. Depending on the system and forcing parameters, liquid-vapor and liquid-solid co-existing states are possible. For the solid-liquid coexistence that…
Nucleation, commonly associated with discontinuous transformations between metastable and stable phases, is crucial in fields as diverse as atmospheric science and nanoscale electronics. Traditionally, it is considered a microscopic process…
We use inelastic hard sphere molecular dynamics simulations and laboratory experiments to study patterns in vertically oscillated granular layers. The simulations and experiments reveal that {\em phase bubbles} spontaneously nucleate in the…
In the framework of the theoretical model of the phase transition of binary solutions into spatially inhomogeneous states proposed earlier by the autors [1], which takes into account nonlinear effects, the role of the cubic in concentration…
We give an abridged account of a continued string of studies in condensed matter physics and in complex systems that span five decades. We provide links to access abstracts and full texts of a selected list of publications. The studies were…
Disordered solids exhibit unusual properties of their vibrational states and thermal conductivities. Recent progresses have well established the concept of "elastic heterogeneity", i.e., disordered materials show spatially inhomogeneous…
The simplicity of hard spheres as a model system is deceptive. Although the particles interact solely through volume exclusion, that nevertheless suffices for a wealth of static and dynamical phenomena to emerge, making the model an…
This thesis can be divided into two independent parts. In the first part of this thesis, we focus on studying the kinetic pathways of nucleation in colloidal systems. In Chapter 2, we briefly introduce the relevant theory of nucleation,…
We consider the problem of heterogeneous nucleation and growth. The system is described by a phase field model in which the temperature is included through thermal noise. We show that this phase field approach is suitable to describe…
Crystallization represents the prime example of a disorder order transition. In realistic situations, however, container walls and impurities are frequently present and hence crystallization is heterogeneously seeded. Rarely the seeds are…
Ice nucleation plays a significant role in a large number of natural and technological processes, but it is challenging to investigate experimentally because of the small time (ns) and short length scales (nm) involved. On the other hand,…
The appearance of nuclear clusters in stellar matter at densities below nuclear saturation is an important feature in the modeling of the equation of state for astrophysical applications. There are different theoretical concepts to describe…
NaCl crystal nucleation from metastable solutions has long been considered to occur according to a single-step mechanism. Recent experimental observations suggest that NaCl crystals emerge from disordered intermediates which is seemingly at…
For a long time, we thought that only symmetry breaking can give rise to different phases of matter. If there was no symmetry breaking, there would be no pattern and it would be featureless. But now we realize that, for quantum matter at…
The theoretical description of the heterogeneous nucleation kinetics is presented. This description takes into account the perturbation of the vapor phase initiated by the growing droplets. The form of the density profile around the growing…