Related papers: Confinement-induced demixing and crystallization

We study how confining the equilibrium hard-sphere fluid to restrictive one- and two-dimensional channels with smooth interacting walls modifies its structure, dynamics, and entropy using molecular dynamics and transition-matrix Monte Carlo…

Confined fluids display complex behavior due to layering and local packing. Here, we disentangle these effects by confining a hard-sphere fluid to the surface of a cylinder, such the circumference extends only over a few particle diameters.…

We simulate a hard-sphere liquid in confined geometry where the separation of the two parallel, hard walls is smaller than two particle diameters. By systematically reducing the wall separation we analyze the behavior of structural and…

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…

A fluidized bed is basically a suspension of granular material by an ascending fluid in a tube, and it has a rich dynamics that includes clustering and pattern formation. When the ratio between the tube and grain diameters is small,…

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 formation of monolayer and multilayer ice with a square lattice structure has recently been reported on the basis of transmission electron microscopy experiments, renewing interest in confined two dimensional ice. Here we report a…

Soft matters whose constituents are deformable are ubiquitous in nature especially in biological systems-including cells and their organelles-as well as in foams and emulsions. The capacity for deformation in these soft materials gives rise…

We use grand canonical transition-matrix Monte Carlo and discontinuous molecular dynamics simulations to generate precise thermodynamic and kinetic data for the equilibrium hard-sphere fluid confined between smooth hard walls. These…

The effect of confinement on the phase behaviour and structure of fluids made of biaxial hard particles (cuboids) is examined theoretically by means of Onsager second-order virial theory in the limit where the long particle axes are frozen…

Liquid water can become metastable with respect to its vapor in hydrophobic confinement. The resulting dewetting transitions are often impeded by large kinetic barriers. According to macroscopic theory, such barriers arise from the free…

Using density-functional theory in the restricted-orientation approximation, we analyse the liquid-crystal patterns and phase behaviour of a fluid of hard rectangular particles confined in a two-dimensional square nanocavity of side length…

The glass transition of mesoscopic charged particles in two-dimensional confinement is studied by mode-coupling theory. We consider two types of effective interactions between the particles, corresponding to two different models for the…

Water confined between two graphene layers with a small separation forms a two-dimensional ice structure,with an apparent square symmetry [Algara-Siller et al., Nature (London) 519, 443 (2015)], which is poorly understood. A density…

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…

Morphologies of a vesicle confined in a spherical vesicle were explored experimentally by fast confocal laser microscopy and numerically by a dynamically-triangulated membrane model with area-difference elasticity. The confinement was found…

We study numerically how multiple deformable capsules squeeze into a constriction. This situation is largely encountered in microfluidic chips designed to manipulate living cells, which are soft entities. We use fully three-dimensional…

Granular crystallisation is an important phenomenon whereby ordered packing structures form in granular matter under vibration. However, compared with the well-developed principles of crystallisation at the atomic scale, crystallisation in…

The surface freezing and surface melting transitions exhibited by a model two-dimensional soft matter system is studied. The behaviour when confined within a wedge is also considered. The system consists of particles interacting via a soft…

Hard-sphere model systems are well-suited in both experiment and simulations to investigate fundamental aspects of the crystallization of fluids. In experiments on colloidal models of hard-sphere fluids, the uid is unavoidably at contact…