Related papers: Deciphering water-solid reactions during hydrother…
Colloidal particles with appropriate wetting properties can become very strongly trapped at an interface between two immiscible fluids. We have harnessed this phenomenon to create a new class of soft materials with intriguing and…
Hydrogels have had a profound impact in the fields of tissue engineering, drug delivery, and materials science as a whole. Due to the network architecture of these materials, imbibement with water often results in uniform swelling and…
Silicon carbide (SiC) is an important technological material, but its high-temperature phase diagram has remained unclear due to conflicting experimental results about congruent versus incongruent melting. Here, we employ large-scale…
Surface tension plays a ubiquitous role in phase transitions including condensation or evaporation of atmospheric liquid droplets. Especially, understanding of interfacial thermodynamics of the critical nucleus of 1 nm scale is important…
Interfaces involving coexisting phases in condensed matter are essential in various examples of soft matter phenomena such as wetting, nucleation, morphology, phase separation kinetics, membranes, phase coexistence in nanomaterials, etc.…
Scanning probe microscopy (SPM) has been extensively applied to probe interfacial water in many interdisciplinary fields but the disturbance of the probes on the hydrogen-bonding structure of water has remained an intractable problem. Here…
Ice formation is one of the most common and important processes on earth and almost always occurs at the surface of a material. A basic understanding of how the physicochemical properties of a material's surface affect its ability to form…
Oxidation of SiC produces SiO2 while CO is released. A `reoxidation' step at lower temperatures is, however, necessary to produce high-quality SiO2. This step is believed to cleanse the oxide of residual C without further oxidation of the…
The kinetics of dissolution of an amorphous solid is studied using a simple model of a glass that captures with reasonable accuracy the dynamic heterogeneities associated with the relaxation of an amorphous material at low temperatures. The…
Palladium (Pd) catalysts have been extensively studied for the direct synthesis of H2O through the hydrogen oxidation reaction at ambient conditions. This heterogeneous catalytic reaction not only holds considerable practical significance…
In order to gain advanced understanding of the kinetics and dynamics of C, N, and O reacting with a solid surface, it is necessary to consider the reaction from the perspectives of bond formation, bond dissociation, bond relaxation, bond…
Understanding the mechanisms of proton energy deposition in matter and subsequent damage formation is fundamental to radiation science. Here we exploit the picosecond (10^-12 s) resolution of laser-driven accelerators to track ultra-fast…
The solvation of carbon monoxide (CO) in liquid water is important for understanding its toxicological effects and biochemical roles. In this paper, we use ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) and CCSD(T)-F12 calculations to assess the…
The motion of suspended colloidal particles generates fluid disturbances in the surrounding medium that create interparticle interactions. While such colloidal hydrodynamic interactions (HIs) have been extensively studied in viscous…
Water is a fundamental component of life, playing a critical role in regulating metabolic processes and facilitating the dissolution and transport of essential molecules. However, the presence of emerging contaminants, such as…
For the first time, an ab initio molecular dynamics simulation was performed to describe the C$_3$S/water interface. The simulation shows that oxides with favorable environment are protonated at first, creating very stable hydroxide groups.…
Self-diffusion and impurity diffusion both play crucial roles in the fabrication of semiconductor nanostructures with high surface-to-volume ratios. However, experimental studies of bulk-surface reactions of point defects in semiconductors…
Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) has been proposed as a geoengineering strategy to mitigate global warming by increasing Earth's albedo. Silica-based materials, such as diamond-doped silica aerogels, have shown promising optical…
The structure of ionic adsorption layers is studied via a proper thermodynamic treatment of the electrostatic and non-electrostatic interactions between the surfactant ions as well as of the effect of thermodynamic non-locality. The…
We report total-energy calculations based on the density-functional theory that clarify microscopic mechanisms of initial stage of graphene formation on the SiC(0001) surface. We explore favorable reactions for desorption of either Si or C…