Related papers: Inverse Solidification Induced by Active Janus Par…
Melting of two-dimensional (2D) equilibrium crystals, from superconducting vortex lattices to colloidal structures, is a complex phenomenon characterized by the sequential loss of positional and orientational order. Whereas melting…
Inverse melting, in which a crystal reversibly transforms into a liquid or amorphous phase upon decreasing the temperature, is considered to be very rare in nature. The search for such an unusual equilibrium phenomenon is often hampered by…
Inverse melting refers to the rare thermodynamic phenomenon in which a solid melts into a liquid upon cooling, a transition that can occur only when the ordered (solid) phase has more entropy than the disordered (liquid) phase, and that has…
Bitter decoration and magneto-optical studies reveal that in heavy-ion irradiated superconductors, a 'porous' vortex matter is formed when vortices outnumber columnar defects (CDs). In this state ordered vortex crystallites are embedded in…
A gold-capped Janus particle suspended in a near-critical binary liquid mixture can self-propel under illumination. We have immobilized such a particle in a narrow channel and studied the nonequilibrium dynamics of a binary solvent around…
Inverse melting is the phenomenon, observed in both Helium isotopes, by which a crystal melts when cooled at constant pressure. I investigate discrete-space analogs of inverse melting by means of two instances of a triangular-lattice-gas…
Melting of a solid is one of the most ubiquitous phenomena observed in nature. Most solids, when heated, melt from a crystalline state to an isotropic liquid at a characteristic temperature. There are however situations where increase in…
In superionic compounds one component pre-melts providing high ionic conductivity to solid state electrolytes. Here, we find sublattice melting in colloidal crystals of oppositely charged particles that are highly asymmetric in size and…
Surface bound catalytic chemical reactions self-propel chemically active Janus particles. In the vicinity of boundaries, these particles exhibit rich behavior, such as the occurrence of wall-bound steady states of "sliding". Most active…
If two phases exist at the same time, such as a gas and a liquid, they have the same temperature. This fundamental law of equilibrium physics is known to apply even to many non-equilibrium systems. However, recently, there has been much…
While active systems possess notable potential to form the foundation of new classes of autonomous materials, designing systems that can extract functional work from active surroundings has proven challenging. In this work, we extend these…
While uniform temperature has no effect on equilibrium properties of hard-core systems, its gradient might substantially change their behaviour. In particular, in hard-disk system subject to temperature difference $\Delta T$ disks are…
Matter under different equilibrium conditions of pressure and temperature exhibits different states such as solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Exotic states of matter, such as Bose- Einstein condensates, superfluidity, chiral magnets,…
We show how deeply quenching a liquid to temperatures where it is linearly unstable and the crystal is the equilibrium phase often produces crystalline structures with defects and disorder. As the solid phase advances into the liquid phase,…
Active systems, from bacterial suspensions to cellular monolayers, are continuously driven out of equilibrium by local injection of energy from their constituent elements and exhibit turbulent-like and chaotic patterns. Here we demonstrate…
Active colloids constitute a novel class of materials composed of colloidal-scale particles locally converting chemical energy into motility, mimicking micro-organisms. Evolving far from equilibrium, these systems display structural…
Using mesoscopic numerical simulations and analytical theory we investigate the coarsening of the solvent structure around a colloidal particle emerging after a temperature quench of the colloid surface. Qualitative differences in the…
Disorder induced melting, where the increase in positional entropy created by random pinning sites drives the order-disorder transition in a periodic solid, provides an alternate route to the more conventional thermal melting. Here, using…
The "melting" of self-formed rigid structures made of a small number of interacting classical particles confined in an irregular two-dimensional space is investigated using Monte Carlo simulations. It is shown that the interplay of…
Using Brownian dynamics computer simulations we show that a two-dimensional suspension of self-propelled ("active") colloidal particles crystallizes at sufficiently high densities. Compared to the equilibrium freezing of passive particles…