Related papers: Slow melting of a disordered quantum crystal
Molecular dynamics simulations show that gold clusters with about 600--3000 atoms crystallize into a Mackay icosahedron upon cooling from the liquid. A detailed surface analysis shows that the facets on the surface of the Mackay icosahedral…
Dynamical mean-field theory is generalized to solve the nonequilibrium Keldysh boundary problem: a system is started in equilibrium at a temperature T=0.1, a uniform electric field is turned on at t=0, and the system is monitored as it…
Liquids crystallize as they cool; however, when crystallization is avoided in some way, they supercool, maintaining their liquidity, and freezing into glass at low temperatures, as ubiquitously observed. These metastable states crystallize…
Injecting a sufficiently large energy density into an isolated many-particle system prepared in a state with long-range order will lead to the melting of the order over time. Detailed information about this process can be derived from the…
In supercooled liquids, vitrification generally suppresses crystallization. Yet some glasses can still crystallize despite the arrest of diffusive motion. This ill-understood process may limit the stability of glasses, but its microscopic…
Experimental advances have allowed for the exploration of nearly isolated quantum many-body systems whose coupling to an external bath is very weak. A particularly interesting class of such systems is those which do not thermalize under…
Nucleation is an activated process in which the system has to overcome a free energy barrier in order for a first-order phase transition between the metastable and the stable phases to take place. In the liquid-to-solid transition the…
We discuss the physics of crystals with small polydispersity near the jamming transition point. For this purpose, we introduce an effective single-particle model taking into account the nearest neighbor structure of crystals. The model can…
We present an extensive but concise review of our present understanding, largely based on theory and simulation work from our group, on the equilibrium behavior of solid surfaces and nanosystems close to the bulk melting point. In the first…
Wigner crystals are extremely fragile, which is shown to result from very strong geometric frustration germane to long-range Coulomb interactions. Physically, this is manifested by a very small characteristic energy scale for shear density…
The fact that a disordered material is not constrained in its properties in the same way as a crystal presents significant and yet largely untapped potential for novel material design. However, unlike their crystalline counterparts,…
Melting in two spatial dimensions, as realized in thin films or at interfaces, represents one of the most fascinating phase transitions in nature, but it remains poorly understood. Even for the fundamental hard-disk model, the melting…
We simulate the melting of a 71 A diameter cluster of Cu. At low temperatures the crystal exhibits facets. With increasing temperatures the open facets pre-melt, the melted regions coalesce into a liquid envelope containing a crystalline…
The crystallization of a metastable melt is one of the most important non equilibrium phenomena in condensed matter physics, and hard sphere colloidal model systems have been used for several decades to investigate this process by…
A theoretical model of the formation of an amorphous phase during the quenching of a metallic melt is proposed. It has been shown that the appearance of a significant temperature gradient during the quenching of a metallic melt leads to…
A crystal of pure nickel grows from its melt at a rate that reaches 70 meters per second. This extraordinary growth rate has led to the suggestion that metallic crystals might provide the next generation of phase change materials. The huge…
Quantum many-body scar states are exceptional finite energy density eigenstates in an otherwise thermalizing system that do not satisfy the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. We investigate the fate of exact many-body scar states under…
Melting is often understood in purely equilibrium terms, where crystalline order disappears once the free energy of the solid equals that of the liquid. Yet at the microscopic level, the initiating events for melting can often be traced to…
We have carried out computer simulations of overcompressed suspensions of hard monodisperse ellipsoids and observed their crystallization dynamics. The system was compressed very rapidly in order to reach the regime of slow, glass-like…
By path integral Monte Carlo simulations we study the phase diagram of two - dimensional mesoscopic clusters formed by electrons in a semiconductor quantum dot or by indirect magnetoexcitons in double quantum dots. At zero (or sufficiently…