Related papers: Spontaneous Crystallization in Systems of Binary H…
The influence of geometry on the local and global packing of particles is important to many fundamental and applied research themes such as the structure and stability of liquids, crystals and glasses. Here, we show by experiments and…
Colloidal crystals with a diamond and pyrochlore structure display wide photonic band gaps at low refractive index contrasts. However, these low-coordinated and open structures are notoriously difficult to self-assemble from colloids…
The stability of organic solar cells is strongly affected by the morphology of the photoactive layers, whose separated crystalline and/or amorphous phases are kinetically quenched far from their thermodynamic equilibrium during the…
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…
The crystallization of a metastable melt is one of the most important non equilibrium phenomena in condensed matter physics, and hard sphere colloidal model systems have been used for several decades to investigate this process by…
We report on a large scale computer simulation study of crystal nucleation in hard spheres. Through a combined analysis of real and reciprocal space data, a picture of a two-step crystallization process is supported: First dense, amorphous…
When a system undergoes a transition from a liquid to a solid phase, it passes through multiple intermediate structures before reaching the final state. However, our knowledge on the exact pathways of this process is limited, mainly due to…
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…
Phase transformations can be difficult to characterize at the microscopic level due to the inability to directly observe individual atomic motions. Model colloidal systems, by contrast, permit the direct observation of individual particle…
We present a computer simulation study on the crystal nucleation process in suspensions of hard spheres, fully taking into account the solvent hydrodynamics. If the dynamics of collodial crystallization were purely diffusive, the crystal…
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…
We consider homogeneous crystallisation rates in confocal microscopy experiments on colloidal nearly hard spheres at the single particle level. These we compare with Brownian dynamics simuations by carefully modelling the softness in the…
Hard sphere suspensions are well recognized model systems of statistical physics and soft condensed matter. We here investigate the temporal evolution of the immediate environment of nucleating and growing crystals and/or their global scale…
In this article, we demonstrate a method for inducing reversible crystal-to-crystal transitions in binary mixtures of soft colloidal particles. Through a controlled decrease of salinity and increasingly dominating electrostatic…
We have carried out molecular dynamics simulations of the crystallization of hard spheres modelling colloidal systems that are studied in conventional and space-based experiments. We use microscopic probes to investigate the effects of…
In this paper we have explored computationally the solidification process of large nickel clusters. This process has the characteristic features of the first order phase transition occurring in a finite system. The focus of our research is…
Molecular dynamics simulations are performed to study the [100] and [111] orientations of the crystal-melt interface between an ordered two-component hard sphere with a NaCl structure and its coexisting binary hard-sphere fluid. The…
We study the phase behavior of hard spheres confined between two parallel hard plates using extensive computer simulations. We determine the full equilibrium phase diagram for arbitrary densities and plate separations from one to five…
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 present a computer simulation study of the crystalline phases of hard ellipsoids of revolution. A previous study [Phys. Rev. E, \textbf{75}, 020402 (2007)] showed that for aspect ratios $a/b\ge 3$ the previously suggested stretched-fcc…