Related papers: Structural Landscapes in Geometrically Frustrated …
The solid-liquid interface free energy \gamma sl is a key parameter controlling nucleation and growth during solidification and other phenomena. There are intrinsic difficulties in obtaining accurate experimental values, and the previous…
We study rough high-dimensional landscapes in which an increasingly stronger preference for a given configuration emerges. Such energy landscapes arise in glass physics and inference. In particular we focus on random Gaussian functions, and…
The dynamics of glass formation in monatomic and binary liquids are studied numerically using a microscopic field theory for the evolution of the time-averaged atomic number density. A stochastic framework combining phase field crystal free…
Liquid crystals (LCs) composed of mesogens play important roles in various scientific and engineering problems. How a system with many mesogens can enter a LC state is an interesting and important problem. Using stiff and free-joint…
Using simulations of hard rods in smectic-A states, we find non-gaussian diffusion and heterogeneous dynamics due to the equilibrium periodic smectic density profiles, which give rise to permanent barriers for layer-to-layer diffusion. This…
The free energy landscape of a protein-like chain in a fluid was studied by combining discontinuous molecular dynamics and parallel tempering. The model protein is a repeating sequence of four different beads, with interactions mimicking…
An important problem in geometric reasoning is to find the configuration of a collection of geometric bodies so as to satisfy a set of given constraints. Recently, it has been suggested that this problem can be solved efficiently by…
We study the phase behavior of a nematic liquid crystal confined between a flat substrate with strong anchoring and a patterned substrate whose structure and local anchoring strength we vary. By first evaluating an effective surface free…
We develop and analyze a two-mode phase-field-crystal model to describe fcc ordering. The model is formulated by coupling two different sets of crystal density waves corresponding to <111> and <200> reciprocal lattice vectors, which are…
We investigate the formation of polycrystalline structures in a class of particle systems. The atomistic energy is modeled as a sum of particle energies that favor atoms being locally isometric to a reference lattice. The discrete frame…
We carry out umbrella sampling Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate the free energy surface of the ST2 model of water as a function two order parameters, the density and a bond-orientational order parameter. We approximate the long-range…
I review recent results from numerical simulations on the structure and dynamics of the ISM, and attempt to put together a coherent dynamical scenario. In particular, I discuss results on 1) the spatial distribution of the gas components,…
Computer simulations of a model glass-forming system are presented, which are particularly sensitive to the correlation between the dynamics and the topography of the potential energy landscape. This analysis clearly reveals that in the…
We study a "helical" superfluid, a nonzero-momentum condensate in a frustrated bosonic model. At mean-field Bogoliubov level, such a novel state exhibits "smectic" fluctuation that are qualitatively stronger than that of a conventional…
We develop a nonlinear, three-dimensional phase field model for crystal plasticity which accounts for the infinite and discrete symmetry group G of the underlying periodic lattice. This generates a complex energy landscape with…
Geometrically frustrated assemblies where building blocks misfit have been shown to generate intriguing phenomena from self-limited growth, fiber formation, to structural complexity. We introduce a graph theory formulation of geometrically…
The phase-field-crystal model is used to access the structure and thermodynamics of interfaces between two coexisting liquid crystalline phases in two spatial dimensions. Depending on the model parameters there is a variety of possible…
This dissertation develops, for several families of statistical mechanical and random growth models, techniques for analyzing infinite-volume asymptotics. In the statistical mechanical setting, we focus on the low-temperature phases of spin…
We investigate connections between the continuum and atomistic descriptions of deformable crystals, using certain interesting results from number theory. The energy of a deformed crystal is calculated in the context of a lattice model with…
The interplay between geometry, topology and order can lead to geometric frustration that profoundly affects the shape and structure of a curved surface. In this commentary we show how frustration in this context can result in the faceting…