Related papers: The effect of confinement on the solid-liquid tran…
Water is an unique material with a long list of thermodynamic, dynamic and structural anomalies, which are usually attributed to the competition between two characteristic length scales in the intermolecular interaction. It has been argued…
We study the phase behavior of a classical system of particles interacting through a strictly convex soft-repulsive potential which, at variance with the pairwise softened repulsions considered so far in the literature, lacks a region of…
Computer simulations are presented of the isotropic-to-nematic transition in a liquid crystal confined between two parallel plates a distance H apart. The plates are neutral and do not impose any anchoring on the particles. Depending on the…
Hydrodynamics is known to have strong effects on the kinetics of phase separation. There exist open questions on how such effects manifest in systems under confinement. Here, we have undertaken extensive studies of the kinetics of phase…
We study theoretically the effects of confinement on active polar gels such as the actin network of eukaryotic cells. Using generalized hydrodynamics equations derived for active gels, we predict, in the case of quasi one-dimensional…
In a cluster crystal, each lattice site is occupied by multiple soft-core particles. As the number density is increased at zero temperature, a `cascade' of isostructural phase transitions can occur between states whose site occupancy…
A simple model of dimerizing hard spheres with highly nontrivial fluid-solid phase behaviour is proposed. The model is studied using the recently proposed resummed thermodynamic perturbation theory for central force (RTPT-CF) associating…
We have explored the phase behavior of a set of water-like models in slit pores of nanoscopic dimensions. The interaction between water and pore walls mimics the graphite surface. A version of density functional method is used as…
We calculate the spatial entanglement between two electrons trapped in a nanostructure for a broad class of confinement potentials, including single and double quantum dots, and core-shell quantum dot structures. By using a parametrized…
We present a comparative study of the excitations in bulk and liquid D2 confined within the pores of MCM-41. The material (Mobile Crystalline Material-41) is a silicate obtained by means of a template that yields a partially crystalline…
Using Monte Carlo simulations, we study the assembly of colloidal particles interacting via isotropic core-corona potentials in two dimensions and confined in a circular box. We explore the structural variety at low temperatures as function…
We find that both continuous and discontinuous hexatic-liquid transitions can happen in the melting of two-dimensional solids of soft-core disks. For three typical model systems, Hertzian, harmonic, and Gaussian-core models, we observe the…
We study the phase behavior of a symmetric binary polymer blend which is confined into a thin film. The film surfaces interact with the monomers via short range potentials. We calculate the phase behavior within the self-consistent field…
We have performed confocal microscopy experiments and computer simulations of colloidal suspensions with moderate volume fraction confined between two quasi-parallel, rough walls [A. Villada-Balbuena et al., Soft Matter, 2022, 18,…
Using event driven molecular dynamics simulations, we study a three dimensional one-component system of spherical particles interacting via a discontinuous potential combining a repulsive square soft core and an attractive square well. In…
Confinement has generally the effect of suppressing order in condensed matter. Indeed, phase transitions such as freezing, or the superfluid transition in liquid helium, occur at lower temperatures in confinement than they do in the bulk.…
We investigate the melting behavior of two-dimensional colloidal crystals stabilized by a core-softened potential featuring two competing interaction length scales. Using molecular dynamics simulations, we analyze three polymorphic solid…
We study the evolution of structural disorder under cooling in supercooled liquids, focusing on covalent networks. We introduce a model for the energy of networks that incorporates weak non-covalent interactions. We show that at…
We consider the sedimentation of a colloidal gel under confinement in the direction of gravity. The confinement allows us to compare directly experiments and computer simulations, for the same system size in the vertical direction. The…
We present the results of molecular dynamics computer simulations of a binary Lennard-Jones liquid confined between two parallel rough walls. These walls are realized by frozen amorphous configurations of the same liquid and therefore the…