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Dislocation nucleation in homogeneous crystals initially unfolds as a linear symmetry-breaking elastic instability. In the absence of explicit nucleation centers, such instability develops simultaneously all over the crystal and due to the…
Through millennia humans exploited the natural property of metals to get stronger or hardened when mechanically deformed. Ultimately rooted in the motion of dislocations, mechanisms of metal hardening remained in the crosshairs of physical…
The stability of a quasicrystalline structure, recently obtained in a molecular-dynamics simulation of rapid cooling of a binary melt, is analyzed for binary hard-sphere mixtures within a density-functional approach. It is found that this…
Nanoscale and microscale confinement of biopolymers naturally occurs in cells and has been recently achieved in artificial structures designed for nanotechnological applications. Here, we present an extensive theoretical investigation of…
The molecular structures of amorphous silica and crystalline quartz are used to predict their intrinsic strength and fracture toughness together with the theoretical strength of silicon dioxide. At the atomic scale, the amorphous silica is…
Automatic crystal orientation determination and orientation mapping are important tools for research on polycrystalline materials. The most common methods of automatic orientation determination rely on detecting and indexing individual…
The structure and microstrucutre of fully-strained BiCrO3 thin films have been investigated by X-rays diffraction and transmission electron microscopy, at room temperature. Interestingly, three structural variants are simultaneously…
Quasicrystals (QCs) are a class of aperiodic ordered structures that emerge in various systems, from metallic alloys to soft matter and driven non-equilibrium systems. Within a mesoscale theory based on slowly-varying complex amplitudes for…
Metal clusters are partway between molecular and bulk systems and thus exhibit special physical and chemical properties. Atoms can rearrange within a cluster to form different structural isomers. Internal degrees of freedom and the…
Changes in lattice structure across sub-regions of protein crystals are challenging to assess when relying on whole crystal measurements. Because of this difficulty, macromolecular structure determination from protein micro and nano…
Biological molecules are characterized by an intrinsic asymmetry known as homochirality. The result is optical activity of biological materials and circular polarization in the light scattered by microorganisms, cells of living organisms,…
Spatial ordering of matter elicits exotic properties sometimes absent from a material's constituents. A few highly mineralised natural materials achieve high toughness through delocalised damage, whereas synthetic particulate composites…
The paper develops the stiffness relationship between the movements and forces among a system of discrete interacting grains. The approach is similar to that used in structural analysis, but the stiffness matrix of granular material is…
Under the challenge of growing a single bilayer of Bi oriented in the (111) crystallographic direction over amorphous substrates, we have studied different thicknesses of Bi thermally evaporated onto silicon oxide in order to shed light on…
The nature of yield in amorphous materials under stress has yet to be fully elucidated. In particular, understanding how microscopic rearrangement gives rise to macroscopic structural and rheological signatures in disordered systems is…
In this article, we demonstrate a method for inducing reversible crystal-to-crystal transitions in binary mixtures of soft colloidal particles. Through a controlled decrease of salinity and increasingly dominating electrostatic…
The architectures of biological hard materials reveal finely tailored complex assemblies of mineral crystals. Numerous recent studies associate the design of these local assemblies with impressive macroscopic response. Reproducing such…
Crystallization represents the prime example of a disorder order transition. In realistic situations, however, container walls and impurities are frequently present and hence crystallization is heterogeneously seeded. Rarely the seeds are…
We introduce structural heterogeneity, a new topological characteristic for semi-ordered materials that captures their degree of organisation at a mesoscopic level and tracks their time-evolution, ultimately detecting the order-disorder…
In growing active matter systems, a large collection of engineered or living autonomous units metabolize free energy and create order at different length scales as they proliferate and migrate collectively. One such example is bacterial…