Related papers: The Effect of Disordered Substrate on Crystallizat…
Using a phase field crystal model we study the structure and dynamics of a drop of colloidal suspension during evaporation of the solvent. We model an experimental system where contact line pinning of the drop on the substrate is…
A colloidal dispersion droplet evaporating from a surface, such as a drying coffee drop, leaves a distinct ring-shaped stain. Although this mechanism is frequently used for particle self-assembly, the conditions for crystallization have…
Recently, the structural disorder-induced topological phase transitions in periodic systems have attracted much attention. However, in aperiodic systems such as quasicrystalline systems, the interplay between structural disorder and band…
Crystals melt when thermal excitations or the concentration of defects in the lattice is sufficiently high. Upon melting, the crystalline long-range order vanishes, turning the solid to a fluid. In contrast to this classical scenario of…
Large-spin two-dimensional magnets are generally expected to develop conventional long-range order once the dominant exchange scale becomes appreciable. The layered spin-$3/2$ maple-leaf compound Na$_2$Mn$_3$O$_7$ defies this expectation:…
We explore the impact of weak disorder on the dynamics of classical particles in a periodically oscillating lattice. It is demonstrated that the disorder induces a hopping process from diffusive to regular motion i.e. we observe the…
We explore liquid crystal order in a cell with a "dirty" substrate imposing a random surface pinning. Modeling such systems by a random-field xy-model with surface heterogeneity, we find that orientational order in the three-dimensional…
We study elastic interactions between colloidal particles and deformation landscapes of undulations in a cholesteric liquid crystal under an electric field applied normal to cholesteric layers. The onset of undulation instability is…
The possible impact of temperature differences during crystal growth is investigated in this study. The organic molecule considered is mandelic acid, an important component for the pharmaceutical industry. The productivity of generating…
Local positional disorder in soft, anharmonic materials has emerged as a central factor in shaping their electronic, vibrational, optical, and transport properties. Viewed mainly as a source of performance degradation, recent theoretical…
The kinetic mechanisms underlying bottom-up assembly of colloidal particles have been widely investigated in efforts to control crystallization pathways and to direct growth into targeted superstructures for applications including photonic…
We examine the statics and dynamics of vortices in the presence of a periodic quasi-one dimensional substrate, focusing on the limit where the vortex lattice constant is smaller than the substrate lattice period. As a function of the…
We study the equilibrium configuration of a nematic liquid crystal bounded by a rough surface. The wrinkling of the surface induces a partial melting in the degree of orientation. This softened region penetrates the bulk up to a length…
We use numerical simulations to study the crystallization of monodisperse systems of hard aspherical particles. We find that particle shape and crystallizability can be easily related to each other when particles are characterized in terms…
We experimentally investigate the nature of 2D phase transitions in a quasi-2D granular fluid. Using a surface decorated with periodically spaced dimples we observe interfacial tension between coexisting liquid and crystal phases.…
I present a study of the influence of disorder in thin magnetic films on the switching behavior of small magnetic cells of well defined shape and size. The disorder considered arises from randomly oriented crystalline grains of different…
In this paper, we study the effect of both an external and crystal magnetic fields for a superlattice with mixed spins (1/2, 1), using Monte Carlo simulations. The ground state phase diagrams, in the external magnetic field, coupling…
Disordering of solids typically leads to amorphization, but polymorph transitions, facilitated by favorable atomic rearrangements, may temporarily help to maintain long-range periodicity in the solid state. In far-from-equilibrium…
We apply optimization algorithms to the problem of finding ground states for crystalline surfaces and flux lines arrays in presence of disorder. The algorithms provide ground states in polynomial time, which provides for a more precise…
Phase separation of sequence-disordered liquid crystalline polymers, a promising class of technological and biological relevance, is studied by field theory, and thermodynamic mechanisms responsible for orientational ordering observed in…