Related papers: Spontaneous Crystallization in Systems of Binary H…

Starting from an ideal crystalline state, we numerically study a nonequilibrium dynamical order- disorder transition promoted by the application of a periodic shearing protocol at low temperatures in model systems in two and three…

Spontaneous liquid-liquid phase separation is commonly understood in terms of phenomenological mean-field theories. These theories correctly predict the structural features of the fluid at sufficiently long time scales and wavelengths.…

Over the past two decades, a large number of studies addressed the topic of crystal nucleation in suspensions of hard spheres. The shared result of all these efforts is that, at low super-saturations, experimentally observed nucleation…

We prove that a system of particles in the plane, interacting only with a certain hard-core constraint, undergoes a fluid/solid phase transition.

Special role in computer simulations of supercooled liquid and glasses is played by few general models representing certain classes of real glass-forming systems. Recently, it was shown that one of the most widely used model glassformers --…

We study the kinetics of the liquid-to-crystal transformation and of gel formation in colloidal suspensions of oppositely charged particles. We analyse, by means of both computer simulations and experiments, the evolution of a fluid…

The interplay between densification and positional ordering during the process of crystal nucleation is a greatly investigated topic. Even for the simplest colloidal model -- hard spheres -- there has been much debate regarding the…

Viscoelastic phase separation of colloidal suspensions can be interrupted to form gels either by glass transition or by crystallization. With a new confocal microscopy protocol, we follow the entire kinetics of phase separation, from…

Particle size polydispersity can help to inhibit crystallization of the hard-sphere fluid into close-packed structures at high packing fractions and thus is often employed to create model glass-forming systems. Nonetheless, it is known that…

The stability of liquid crystal phases in presence of small amount of non-mesogenic impurities is of general interest for a large spectrum of technological applications and in the theories of binary mixtures. Starting from the known phase…

Colloidal glasses form from hard spheres, nearly hard spheres, ellipsoids and platelets or their attractive variants have been studied in detail. Complementing and checking theoretical approaches and simulations, the many different types of…

We study a quasi-two-dimensional macroscopic system of magnetic spherical particles settled on a shallow concave dish under a temporally oscillating magnetic field. The system reaches a stationary state where the energy losses from…

We present a phase field theory for binary crystal nucleation. In the one-component limit, quantitative agreement is achieved with computer simulations (Lennard-Jones system) and experiments (ice-water system) using model parameters…

Nucleation in systems with a metastable liquid-gas critical point is the prototypical example of a two-step nucleation process, in which the appearance of the critical nucleus is preceded by the formation of a liquid-like density…

We study low-salt, binary aqueous suspensions of charged colloidal spheres of size ratio Phi = 0.57, number densities below the eutectic number density n_E, and number fractions of p = 1.00-0.40. The typical phase obtained by solidification…

Fractionation is necessary for self-assembly in multicomponent mixtures. Here, reversible fractionation and crystallization are realized and studied in a two-dimensional binary colloids which is supersaturated by enhancing the attraction…

The interplay between crystal nucleation and the structure of the metastable fluid has been a topic of significant debate over recent years. In particular, it has been suggested that even in simple model systems such as hard or charged…

The response of amorphous solids to an applied shear deformation is an important problem, both in fundamental and applied research. To tackle this problem, we focus on a system of hard spheres in infinite dimensions as a solvable model for…

We investigate the liquid-solid transition of two dimensional hard spheres in the presence of gravity. We determine the transition temperature and the fraction of particles in the solid regime as a function of temperature via Even-Driven…

In recent work we revisited the phase diagram of hard ellipsoids of revolution (spheroids) by means of replica exchange Monte Carlo simulations. This was done by setting random initial configurations, and allows to confirm the formation of…