Related papers: Confinement-induced demixing and crystallization
Active particles under soft confinement such as droplets or vesicles present intriguing phenomena, as collective motion emerges alongside the deformation of the environment. A model is employed to systematically investigate droplet…
The process of homogeneous crystal nucleation has been considered in a model liquid, where the interparticle interaction is described by a short-range spherical oscillatory potential. Mechanisms of initiating structural ordering in the…
We extend the transfer matrix method of one-dimensional hard core fluids placed between confining walls for that case where the particles can pass each other and at most two layers can form. We derive an eigenvalue equation for a…
We investigate the ground state of a classical two-dimensional system of hard-sphere dipoles confined between two hard walls. Using lattice sum minimization techniques we reveal that at fixed wall separations, a first-order transition from…
The behavior of a system of two-dimensional elongated particles (discorectangles) packed into a slit between two parallel walls was analyzed using a simulation approach. The packings were produced using the random sequential adsorption…
We have identified the ground state configurations of soft particles (interacting via inverse power potentials) confined between two hard, impenetrable walls. To this end we have used a highly reliable optimization scheme at {\it vanishing}…
In many interesting physical settings, such as the vulcanization of rubber, the introduction of permanent random constraints between the constituents of a homogeneous fluid can cause a phase transition to a random solid state. In this…
In the realm of nanoscience, the dynamic behaviors of liquids at scales beyond the conventional structural relaxation time, $\tau$, unfold a fascinating blend of solid-like characteristics, including the propagation of collective shear…
Two-dimensional confinement of lattices produces a variety of order and disorder phenomena. When the confining walls have atomic granularity, unique structural phases are expected, of relevance in nanotribology, porous materials or…
Purely entropic systems such as suspensions of hard rods, platelets and spheres show rich phase behavior. Rods and platelets have successfully been used as models to predict the equilibrium properties of liquid crystals for several decades.…
We report the observation of the homogenous nucleation of crystals in a dense layer of steel spheres confined between two horizontal plates vibrated vertically. Above a critical vibration amplitude, two-layer crystals with square symmetry…
Because final properties of nanoscale polymeric structures are largely determined by the solid-state microstructure of the confined polymer, it is imperative not only to understand how the microstructure of polymers develops under nanoscale…
The design of an experiment on the spontaneous crystallization of a laser-cooled, but thermal atomic cloud into a hexagonally structured phase is discussed. Atomic interaction is mediated by the dipole potential of an optical lattice formed…
A fresh approach to the data from experiments with hard sphere colloids yields seminal insights into the glass transition. The precise determination of the fraction of particles caged by their neighbours is unprecedented and provides…
Monodisperse spherical colloidal particles confined within emulsion droplets can crystallize into icosahedral clusters. Experimentally it was observed that a few large colloidal particles added as defects preferentially migrate to the…
We prepared a buoyancy matched binary mixture of polydisperse polystyrene microgel spheres of size ratio 0.785 and at a volume fraction of 0.567 just below the kinetic glass transition. In line with theoretical expectations, a eutectic…
A binary mixture of super-paramagnetic colloidal particles is confined between glass plates such that the large particles become fixed and provide a two-dimensional disordered matrix for the still mobile small particles, which form a fluid.…
The onset of structural arrest and glass formation in a concentrated suspension of silica nanoparticles in a water-lutidine binary mixture near its consolute point is studied by exploiting the near-critical fluid degrees of freedom to…
By means of extensive replica-exchange simulations of generic coarse-grained models for helical polymers, we systematically investigate the structural transitions into all possible helical phases for flexible and semiflexible elastic…
We analyze the displacements of the particles of a glass-forming molecular liquid perpendicular to a confining solid surface, using extensive molecular dynamics simulations with atomistic models. In the vicinity of an attractive surface,…