Related papers: Structural Landscapes in Geometrically Frustrated …
The dynamics of biological polymers, including proteins, RNA, and DNA, occur in very high-dimensional spaces. Many naturally-occurring polymers can navigate a vast phase space and rapidly find their lowest free energy (folded) state. Thus,…
Kinetically constrained models (KCMs) are models of glass formers based on the concept of dynamic facilitation. This concept accounts for many of the characteristics of the glass transition. KCMs usually display a combination of simple…
In order to better understand the occurrence of phase transitions, we adopt an approach based on the study of energy landscapes: The relation between stationary points of the potential energy landscape of a classical many-particle system…
Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are soft phase-changing solids that exhibit large reversible contractions upon heating, Goldstone-like soft modes and resultant microstructural instabilities. We heat a planar LCE slab to isotropic, clamp…
We consider both equilibrium and kinetic aspects of the phase separation (``thermal faceting") of thermodynamically unstable crystal surfaces into a hill--valley structure. The model we study is an Ising lattice gas for a simple cubic…
The uniform director field obtained for the nematic ground state of the hard-rod model of liquid crystals in two dimensions reflects the high symmetry of the constituents of the liquid; It is a manifestation of the constituents' local…
Computer simulations of simple model systems for liquid crystals are briefly reviewed, with special emphasis on systems of ellipsoids. First, we give an overview over some of the most commonly studied systems (ellipsoids, Gay-Berne…
The theory of mesoscopic fluctuations is applied to inhomogeneous solids consisting of chaotically distributed regions with different crystalline structure. This approach makes it possible to describe statistical properties of such mixture…
We investigate the possibility to control the symmetry of ordered states in phase-field crystal models by tuning nonlinear resonances. In two dimensions, we find that a state of square symmetry as well as coexistence between squares and…
We present the formalism of phenomenological thermodynamics in terms of the even-dimensional symplectic geometry, and argue that it catches its geometric essence in a more profound and clearer way than the popular odd-dimensional contact…
The understanding, and even the description of protein folding is impeded by the complexity of the process. Much of this complexity can be described and understood by taking a statistical approach to the energetics of protein conformation,…
We consider a continuum model describing the dynamic behavior of nematic liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) and implement a numerical scheme to solve the governing equations. In the model, the Helmholtz free energy and Rayleigh dissipation…
The knowledge of the Free Energy Landscape topology is the essential key to understand many biochemical processes. The determination of the conformers of a protein and their basins of attraction takes a central role for studying molecular…
Energetic correlations due to polymeric constraints and the locality of interactions, in conjunction with the apriori specification of the existence of a particularly low energy state, provides a method of introducing the aspect of minimal…
Landau's theory of phase transitions is adapted to treat independently relaxing regions in complex systems using nanothermodynamics. The order parameter we use governs the thermal fluctuations, not a specific static structure. We find that…
We describe here in detail the recently introduced methodology for simulation of structural transitions in crystals. The applications of the new scheme are illustrated on various kinds of crystals and the advantages with respect to previous…
We describe an effective landscape introduced in [1] for the analysis of Constraint Satisfaction problems, such as Sphere Packing, K-SAT and Graph Coloring. This geometric construction reexpresses these problems in the more familiar terms…
We derive a coarse grained, free-energy functional which describes droplet configurations arising on nucleation of a product crystal within a parent. This involves a new `slow' vacancy mode that lives at the parent-product interface. A…
The concept of fragility provides a possibility to rank different supercooled liquids on the basis of the temperature dependence of dynamic and/or thermodynamic quantities. We recall here the definitions of kinetic and thermodynamic…
We investigate the connection between the geometry of Favoured Local Structures (FLS) in liquids and the associated liquid and solid properties. We introduce a lattice spin model - the FLS model on a face-centered cubic lattice - where this…