Related papers: Observation of a metastable intermediate during so…
The desire to exert active optical control over matter is a unifying theme across multiple scientific disciplines, as exemplified by all-optical magnetic switching, light-induced metastable or exotic phases of solids and the coherent…
We report here the observation of a surprising phenomenon consisting in a oscillating phase transition which appears in a binary mixture, PMMA/3-octanone, when this is enlightened by a strongly focused infrared laser beam. PMMA/3-octanone…
Computer simulations of the fluid-to-solid phase transition in the hard sphere system were instrumental for our understanding of crystallization processes. But while colloid experiments and theory have been predicting the stability of…
Applying the time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau equations, transitions between metastable states of a superconducting ring are investigated in the presence of an external magnetic field. It is shown that if the ring exhibits several metastable…
Lead titanate (PbTiO3) is a classical example of a ferroelectric perovskite oxide illustrating a displacive phase transition accompanied by a softening of a symmetry-breaking mode. The underlying assumption justifying the soft-mode theory…
We investigate the two-dimensional melting of deformable polymeric particles with multi-body interactions described by the Voronoi model. We report machine learning evidence for the existence of the intermediate hexatic phase in this…
The structure and stability of iron near melting at multi-megabar pressures are of significant interest in high pressure physics and earth and planetary sciences. While the body-centered cubic (BCC) phase is generally recognized as unstable…
We study the liquid-solid transition in a collection of interacting particles moving through a dissipative medium under the action of a constant, spatially uniform external force, e.g. a charge-stabilized suspension in a fluidized bed or a…
Solvent-mediated solid-solid phase transformations often result in the formation of a porous medium, which may be stable on long time scales or undergo ripening and consolidation. We have studied replace- ment processes in the KBr-KCl-H2O…
We present detailed systematic studies of structural transformations in thin liquid crystal films with the smectic-C to hexatic phase transition. For the first time all possible structures reported in the literature are observed for one…
By using direct numerical simulations of up to a record resolution of 512x512x32768 grid points we discover the existence of a new metastable out-of-equilibrium state in rotating turbulence. We scan the phase space by varying both the…
This paper extends our earlier studies of free energy functions of density and crystalline order parameters for models of supercooled water, which allows us to examine the possibility of two distinct metastable liquid phases [J. Chem. Phys.…
A free-energy minimization approach is used to address the secular & dynamical instabilities & the bifurcations along sequences of rotating, self-gravitating fluid and stellar systems. Our approach stems from the Landau-Ginzburg theory of…
The origin of the very large piezoelectric response observed in the vicinity of the morphotropic phase boundary (MPB) in perovskite lead zirconate titanate and related systems has been under intensive studies. Polarization rotation ideas…
We report the numerical investigation of strain induced superconductor-insulator quantum phase transition on a Lieb lattice. Based on a non perturbative Monte Carlo technique, we show that in two dimensions an s-wave superconductor…
We present the results of an experiment where amorphous carbon was irradiated by femtosecond x-ray free electron laser pulses. The 830 eV laser pulses induce a phase transition in the material which is characterized ex-situ. The phase…
Under an electric field, chiral smectic liquid crystals transit usually to the unwound SmC* phase where the helical structure is completely unrolled. Sometimes the sample transits initially towards an intermediate polar state before the…
The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, via a phenomenological consideration I show that, equally with the conventional phases (body-centred cubic, hexagonal planar and lamellar), such non-conventional phases as simple cubic,…
The structural phase behaviors of pure zirconium metal under compressions up to $160$ GPa at room temperature are investigated from the perspective of ensemble theory where the partition function is solved by our recently proposed method…
The rich phase diagram of bulk Pr$_{1-x}$Ca$_{x}$MnO$_3$ resulting in a high tunability of physical properties gave rise to various studies related to fundamental research as well as prospective applications of the material. Importantly, as…