Related papers: Complex Crystals from Size-disperse Spheres
Unlike atoms, colloidal particles are not identical, but can only be synthesised within a finite size tolerance. Colloids are therefore polydisperse, i.e. mixtures of infinitely many components with sizes drawn from a continuous…
In experimental systems, colloidal particles are virtually always at least somewhat polydisperse, which can have profound effects on their ability to crystallize. Unfortunately, accurately predicting the effects of polydispersity on phase…
We report a molecular dynamics study of crystallization in highly asymmetric binary hard-sphere mixtures, in which the large spheres can form a crystal phase while the small ones remain disordered during the crystallization process of the…
Slow dynamics in a fluid are studied in one of the most basic systems possible: polydisperse hard spheres. Monodisperse hard spheres cannot be studied as the slow down in dynamics as the density is increased is preempted by crystallisation.…
We study by molecular dynamics the interplay between arrest and crystallization in hard spheres. For state points in the plane of volume fraction ($0.54 \leq phi \leq 0.63$) and polydispersity ($0 \leq s \leq 0.085$), we delineate states…
Microcanonical Monte Carlo simulations of a polydisperse soft-spheres model for liquids and colloids have been performed for very large polydispersity, in the region where a phase-separation is known to occur when the system (or part of it)…
We consider the nature of the fluid-solid phase transition in a polydisperse mixture of hard spheres. For a sufficiently polydisperse mixture crystallisation occurs with simultaneous fractionation. At the fluid-solid boundary, a broad fluid…
We study numerically the crystallization of a hard-sphere mixture with 8\% polydispersity. Although often used as a model glass former, for small system sizes we observe crystallization in molecular dynamics simulations. This opens the…
Motivated by old experiments on colloidal suspensions, we report molecular dynamics simulations of assemblies of hard spheres, addressing crystallization and glass formation. The simulations cover wide ranges of polydispersity s (standard…
The phase diagram of soft spheres with size dispersion has been studied by means of an optimized Monte Carlo algorithm which allows to equilibrate below the kinetic glass transition for all sizes distribution. The system ubiquitously…
We have carried out computer simulations of overcompressed suspensions of hard monodisperse ellipsoids and observed their crystallization dynamics. The system was compressed very rapidly in order to reach the regime of slow, glass-like…
Hard spheres with a polydispersity above approximately 8% are shown to crystallise into two phase-separated solid phases. A polydispersity above 8% is too large to be tolerated by a single solid phase but phase separation produces two…
We report on the crystallization kinetics in an entropically attractive colloidal system using a combination of time resolved scattering methods and microscopy. Hard sphere particles are polystyrene microgels swollen in a good solvent…
Colloidal fluids can exhibit complex phase behavior and determining phase diagrams via experiments or computer simulations can be laborious. We demonstrate that the dispersion relation $\omega(k)$, obtained from dynamical density functional…
Metal crystals with tetrahedral packing are known as Frank-Kasper phases with large unit cells with the number of atoms from hundreds to thousands. The main factors of the formation and stability of these phases are the atomic size ratio…
We investigate the response of a system of hard spheres to two classes of perturbations over a range of densities spanning the fluid, crystalline, and glassy regimes within a molecular dynamics framework. Firstly, we consider the relaxation…
We address the crystallization of monodisperse hard spheres in terms of the properties of finite- size crystalline clusters. By means of large scale event-driven Molecular Dynamics simulations, we study systems at different packing…
First, we have ensured that spherical nonrotating collisionless systems collapse with almost retaining spherical configurations during initial contraction phases even if they are allowed to collapse three-dimensionally. Next, on the…
We study the optical properties of crystals with spatial dispersion and show that the usual Fresnel approach becomes invalid near frequencies where the group velocity of the wave packets inside the crystal vanishes. Near these special…
The equilibrium phase behaviour of hard spheres with size polydispersity is studied theoretically. We solve numerically the exact phase equilibrium equations that result from accurate free energy expressions for the fluid and solid phases,…