Related papers: Confinement-induced demixing and crystallization
We study a dense colloidal suspension confined between two quasiparallel glass plates as a model system for a supercooled liquid in confined geometries. We directly observe the three-dimensional Brownian motion of the colloidal particles…
Glass forming liquids exhibit a rich phenomenology upon confinement. This is often related to the effects arising from wall-fluid interactions. Here we focus on the interesting limit where the separation of the confining walls becomes of…
We study a colloidal suspension confined between two quasi-parallel walls as a model system for glass transitions in confined geometries. The suspension is a mixture of two particle sizes to prevent wall-induced crystallization. We use…
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…
Confinement can have a dramatic effect on the behavior of all sorts of particulate systems and it therefore is an important phenomenon in many different areas of physics and technology. Here, we investigate the role played by the softness…
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…
Extending mode-coupling theory, we elaborate a microscopic theory for the glass transition of liquids confined between two parallel flat hard walls. The theory contains the standard MCT equations in bulk and in two dimensions as limiting…
We demonstrate that a fluidized bed of hard spheres during defluidization displays properties associated with formation of a glass. The final state is rate dependent, and as this state is approached, the bed exhibits heterogeneity with…
We report results of computer simulations of two-dimensional hard disks confined within a quasi one-dimensional ``hard-wall'' channel, a few atomic radii wide. Starting from a commensurate triangular solid a rescaling of the system size…
In supercooled liquids, vitrification generally suppresses crystallization. Yet some glasses can still crystallize despite the arrest of diffusive motion. This ill-understood process may limit the stability of glasses, but its microscopic…
Using molecular dynamics calculations and the Voronoi tessellation, we study the evolution of the local structure of a soft-sphere glass versus temperature starting from the liquid phase at different quenching rates. This study is done for…
Crystallization and vitrification are two different routes to form a solid. Normally these two processes suppress each other, with the glass transition preventing crystallization at high density (or low temperature). This is even true for…
Unstable systems of fluidized grains in a very-narrow vertical tube can auto-defluidize after some time, the settling particles forming either a glass- or crystal-like structure. We carried out experiments using different polymer spheres,…
The growth of crystals confined in porous or cellular materials is ubiquitous in Nature and industry. Confinement affects the formation of biominerals in living organisms, of minerals in the Earth's crust and of salt crystals damaging…
It is well-known that the liquid properties in a strongly confined system can be very different from their ordinary behaviors in an extended system, due to the competition between the thermal energy and the interaction energy. Here we show…
Confinement can significantly alter fluid properties, offering potential for specific technological applications. However, achieving precise control over the structural complexity of confined fluids and soft matter remains challenging, as…
Systems in which particles can self-assemble into mono- or bilayers can form variety of stable and metastable structures on a nanometer length scale. For this reason confinement has a particularly strong effect on such systems. We discuss…
Studies of random close packing of spheres have advanced our knowledge about the structure of systems such as liquids, glasses, emulsions, granular media, and amorphous solids. When these systems are confined their structural properties…
The formation of (bio)molecular condensates via liquid-liquid phase separation in cells has received increasing attention, as these coacervates play important functional and regulatory roles within biological systems. However, the majority…
By molecular-dynamics simulations, we have studied the devitrification (or crystallization) of aged hard-sphere glasses. First, we find that the dynamics of the particles are intermittent: Quiescent periods, when the particles simply…