Related papers: Floppy hydrated salt microcrystals
Unstable systems of fluidized grains in a very-narrow vertical tube can auto-defluidize after some time, the settling particles forming either a glass- or crystal-like structure. We carried out experiments using different polymer spheres,…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
Solvation of ions is ubiquitous on our planet. Solvated ions have a profound effect on the behavior of ionic solutions, which is crucial in nature and technology. Experimentally, ions have been classified into "structure makers" or…
From microactuators to biological tissues, non-porous materials with the ability to strongly expand when in contact with a solvent are ubiquitous. Consequently, the swelling of polymer systems such as hydrogel has received recently much…
Understanding the nature of solvated electrons is important in studying a range of chemical and biological phenomena. This study investigates the structural and dynamical behavior of an excess electron in water, examining different…
We discuss the behavior of a crystalline surface with a disordered substrate. We focus on the possible existence of a {\em super-rough} glassy phase, with height-height correlation functions which vary as the square logarithm of the…
Faraday waves (FWs), or surface waves oscillating at half of the natural frequency when a liquid is vertically vibrated, are archetypes of ordering transitions on liquid surfaces. The existence of unbounded FW-patterns sustained upon bulk…
Solid materials are commonly classified as crystalline or amorphous based on the presence or absence of long-range order.Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), like other solids,also display markedly different properties and functions in these…
Understanding the hydration and diffusion of ions in water at the molecular level is a topic of widespread importance. The ammonium ion (NH$_4^+$) is an exemplar system that has received attention for decades because of its complex…
Phase transitions in polar binary mixtures can be drastically altered even by a small amount of salt. This is because the preferential solvation strongly depends on the ambient composition. Together with a summary of our research in this…
Impurities in crystalline materials introduce disorder into an otherwise ordered structure due to the formation of lattice defects and grain boundaries. The properties of the resulting polycrystal can differ remarkably from those of the…
Many crystals in nature exhibit fascinating mechanical, optical, magnetic and other characteristics. One of the reasons for this phenomenon has to do with the presence of specific organic molecules that are tightly associated with the…
The local structure study reveals important aspects of the physical properties, because it is closely related to the electronic structure. Standard crystallographic analysis based on a space group fails to observe disorder in the crystal…
Soft matters whose constituents are deformable are ubiquitous in nature especially in biological systems-including cells and their organelles-as well as in foams and emulsions. The capacity for deformation in these soft materials gives rise…
Antagonistic salts are composed of hydrophilic and hydrophobic ions. In a mixture solvent (water-oil) such ion pairs are preferentially attracted to water or oil, giving rise to a coupling between the charge density and the composition.…
Water hydrogen bonding is extremely versatile; approximately 20 ice structures and several types of clathrate hydrate structures have been identified. These crystalline water structures form at temperatures below room temperature and/or at…
The presence of microparticles (clusters of micron size) of unknown origin in the volume of water, including highly purified water (bidistilled, deionized), has been repeatedly demonstrated by various methods of physical analysis. Various…
The mass physical and dynamic properties of marine mud deposits are a function of the interaction among a maximum of four sediment Phases as follows: (1) clay mineral solids that often include silt and sand size particles of different…
Cyclodextrins are a family of oligosaccharides with a toroid shape which exhibit a unique ability of entrapping guest molecules in their internal cavity. Water is the primary guest molecule and is omnipresent in the crystalline phases…
A drop of aqueous potato starch gel with a certain mole fraction of NaCl, when dried on a glass slide, exhibits strong segregation and intricate pattern formation phenomena. The salt forms radial dendritic crystalline aggregates near the…