Related papers: An atomic perspective on the serpentine-chlorite s…
Amorphous solids are ubiquitous among natural and man-made materials. Often used as structural materials for their attractive mechanical properties, their utility depends critically on their response to applied stresses. Processes…
The prototypical $\alpha\to\omega$ phase transition in zirconium is an ideal test-bed for our understanding of polymorphism under extreme loading conditions. After half a century of study, a consensus had emerged that the transition is…
Herein, fundamentals of topology and symmetry breaking are used to understand crystallization and geometrical frustration in topologically close-packed structures. This frames solidification from a new perspective that is unique from…
Perovskite structured materials contain myriad tunable ordered phases of electronic and magnetic origin with proven technological importance and strong promise for a variety of energy solutions. An always-contributing influence beneath…
We present an ab-initio study of boron nitride as well as carbon allotropes. Their relative thermodynamic stabilities and structural phase transitions from low- to high-density phases are investigated. Pressure-temperature phase diagrams…
It has recently been shown that yield in amorphous solids under oscillatory shear is a dynamical transition from asymptotically periodic to asymptotically chaotic, diffusive dynamics. However, the type and universality class of this…
Smectic liquid crystals are materials formed by stacking deformable, fluid layers. Though smectics prefer to have flat, uniformly-spaced layers, boundary conditions can impose curvature on the layers. Since the layer spacing and curvature…
We introduce columnar shifts---collective rigid-body translations---as a structural degree of freedom relevant to the phase behaviour of molecular perovskites ABX$_{\textrm3}$ (X = molecular anion). Like the well-known octahedral tilts of…
Review of selected fundamental topics on the interaction between phase transformations, fracture, and other structural changes in inelastic materials is presented. It mostly focuses on the concepts developed in the author's group over last…
Clay mineral particles are interesting nanosized building blocks due to their high aspect ratio and the chemical properties. The main interest in this nanosized building blocks results essentially from the colloidal size and the permanent…
For particles confined to two dimensions, any curvature of the surface affects the structural, kinetic and thermodynamic properties of the system. If the curvature is non-uniform, an even richer range of behaviours can emerge. Using a…
Calcite has the ability to host large amounts of intracrystalline inclusions, a phenomenon that is known to be the case in biominerals and has been demonstrated in bio-inspired synthetic systems. In this study, we focused on barium as the…
We report a steplike lattice transformation of single crystalline (La$_{0.4}$Pr$_{0.6}$)$_{1.2}$Sr$_{1.8}$Mn$_{2}$O$_{7}$bilayered manganite accompanied by both magnetization and magnetoresistive jumps, and examine the ultrasharp nature of…
Phase transformations can be difficult to characterize at the microscopic level due to the inability to directly observe individual atomic motions. Model colloidal systems, by contrast, permit the direct observation of individual particle…
The influence of alternating shear orientation and strain amplitude of cyclic loading on yielding in amorphous solids is investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. The model glass is represented via a binary mixture that was rapidly…
Solid materials possess both long-range order and some degree of disorder are critical for understanding the nature of crystal and glassy state, but how to controllable introduce specific type of disorder into a crystalline material is a…
In recent experiments on sodium chloride clusters structural transitions between nanocrystals with different cuboidal shapes were detected. Here we presents results for the thermodynamics and dynamics of one of these clusters, (NaCl)35Cl-.…
The sharp drops in the resistance and magnetization which are usually attributed to a phase transition from the vortex liquid state to a crystal state are explained instead as a crossover between three and two dimensional behavior, which…
Metal halide perovskites have shown extraordinary performance in solar energy conversion technologies. They have been classified as "soft semiconductors" due to their flexible corner-sharing octahedral networks and polymorphous nature.…
We consider the nature of the fluid-solid phase transition in a polydisperse mixture of hard spheres. For a sufficiently polydisperse mixture crystallisation occurs with simultaneous fractionation. At the fluid-solid boundary, a broad fluid…