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Nucleation processes, through which a new structure progressively forms within a pre-existing homogeneous phase, are fundamental in materials science, but are also typically non-trivial to elucidate. Cases in which to nucleate are defects…

Classical nucleation theory is used to estimate the free-energy barrier to nucleation of the solid phase of particles interacting via a potential which has a short-ranged attraction. Due to the high interfacial tension between the fluid and…

Propagating nuclear uncertainties to nucleosynthesis simulations is key to understand the impact of theoretical uncertainties on the predictions, especially for processes far from the stability region, where nuclear properties are scarcely…

Simulations of r-process nucleosynthesis require nuclear physics information for thousands of neutron-rich nuclear species from the line of stability to the neutron drip line. While arguably the most important pieces of nuclear data for the…

Nucleation, the birth of a stable cluster from disorder, is inherently stochastic. Yet up to date, there are no quantitative studies on NaCl nucleation that accounts for its stochastic nature. Here, we report the first stochastic treatment…

Nucleosynthesis in Type I X-ray bursts may involve up to several thousand nuclear processes. The majority of these processes have only been determined theoretically due to the lack of sufficient experimental information. Accurate reaction…

The nucleation of crystals is a prominent phenomenon in science and technology that still lacks a full atomic-scale understanding. Much work has been devoted to identifying order parameters able to track the process, from the inception of…

Nuclear masses are one of the key ingredients of nuclear physics that go into astrophysical simulations of the $r$ process. Nuclear masses effect $r$-process abundances by entering into calculations of Q-values, neutron capture rates,…

Atomistic simulations based on the first-principles of quantum mechanics are reaching unprecedented length scales. This progress is due to the growth in computational power allied with the development of new methodologies that allow the…

Tunneling half lives are obtained in a minimalistic deformation picture of nuclear decays. As widely documented in other deformation models, one finds that the effective mass of the nucleus changes with the deformation parameter. However,…

We present an experiment on crystallization of packings of macroscopic granular spheres. This system is often considered to be a model for thermally driven atomic or colloidal systems. Cyclically shearing a packing of frictional spheres, we…

Nucleosynthesis calculations require nuclear level densities for hundreds or even thousands of nuclides. Ideally one would like to constrain these level densities by microscopically motivated yet computationally cheap models. A statistical…

The phenomenon of solidification of a substance from its liquid phase is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance, and atomistic simulations can provide precious information towards its understanding and control. Unfortunately,…

In cosmology numerical simulations of structure formation are now of central importance, as they are the sole instrument for providing detailed predictions of current cosmological models for a whole class of important constraining…

Charged colloidal particles - both on the nano and micron scales - have been instrumental in enhancing our understanding of both atomic and colloidal crystals. These systems can be straightforwardly realized in the lab, and tuned to…

It is imperative that useful quantum computers be very difficult to simulate classically; otherwise classical computers could be used for the applications envisioned for the quantum ones. Perfect quantum computers are unarguably…

We investigate a phase-field-crystal model for homogeneous nucleation. Instead of solving the time evolution of a density field towards equilibrium we use a String Method to identify saddle points in phase space. The saddle points allow to…

The use of quantality is discussed in the case of nuclei and other many-body systems such as atomic electrons. This dimensionless quantity is known to indicate when a many-body system behaves like a crystal or a quantum liquid. Its role is…

Using state-of-the-art rare-event sampling simulations, we precisely characterize the nucleation of liquid droplets from a supersaturated Lennard-Jones gas and uncover a key physical feature: critical clusters nucleate with a density that…

Molecular crystals play a central role in a wide range of scientific fields, including pharmaceuticals and organic semiconductor devices. However, they are challenging systems to model accurately with computational approaches because of a…