Related papers: Driving and characterizing nucleation of urea and …
The nucleation of crystals in liquids is one of nature's most ubiquitous phenomena, playing an important role in areas such as climate change and the production of drugs. As the early stages of nucleation involve exceedingly small time and…
Identifying local structural motifs and packing patterns of molecular solids is a challenging task for both simulation and experiment. We demonstrate two novel approaches to characterize local environments in different polymorphs of…
Here we propose the Reweighted Autoencoded Variational Bayes for Enhanced Sampling (RAVE) method, a new iterative scheme that uses the deep learning framework of variational autoencoders to enhance sampling in molecular simulations. RAVE…
The study of chemical reactions in aqueous media is very important for its implications in several fields of science, from biology to industrial processes. Modelling these reactions is however difficult when water directly participates in…
We investigate crystal nucleation in supersaturated colloid suspensions using enhanced molecular dynamics simulations augmented with machine learning techniques. The simulations reveal that crystallization in the model colloidal system…
Most substances can crystallise into two or more different crystal lattices, called polymorphs. Despite this, there are no systems in which we can quantitatively predict the probability of one competing polymorph forming, instead of the…
All-atom molecular dynamics has been recently proven a useful tool for the study of supramolecular polymers. While the high resolution offered by the atomistic models may allow for deep comprehension of the assembled structure, obtaining a…
Despite the simplicity of its molecular unit, water is a challenging system because of its uniquely rich polymorphism and predicted but yet unconfirmed features. Introducing a novel space of generalized coordinates that capture changes in…
Crucial to gaining control over crystallisation in multicomponent materials or accurately modelling rheological behaviour of magma flows is to understand the mechanisms by which crystal nuclei form. The microscopic nature of such nuclei,…
Over recent years, molecular simulations have provided invaluable insights into the microscopic processes governing the initial stages of crystal nucleation and growth. A key aspect that has been observed in many different systems is the…
We have carried out molecular dynamics simulations of the crystallization of hard spheres modelling colloidal systems that are studied in conventional and space-based experiments. We use microscopic probes to investigate the effects of…
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…
Urea, a polar molecule with a large dipole moment, not only destabilizes the folded RNA structures, but can also enhance the folding rates of large ribozymes. Unlike the mechanism of urea-induced unfolding of proteins, which is well…
Understanding the driving forces behind the nucleation of different polymorphs is of great importance for material sciences and the pharmaceutical industry. This includes understanding the reaction coordinate that governs the nucleation…
In this work we examine the nucleation from NaCl aqueous solutions within nano-confined environments, employing enhanced sampling molecular dynamics simulations integrated with machine learning-derived reaction coordinates. Through our…
Polymerases are protein enzymes that move along nucleic acid chains and catalyze template-based polymerization reactions during gene transcription and replication. The polymerases also substantially improve transcription or replication…
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…
We developed a multiscale approach (MultiSCAAL) that integrates the potential of mean force (PMF) obtained from all-atomistic molecular dynamics simulations with a knowledge-based energy function for coarse-grained molecular simulations in…
Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of ions (K$^+$, Na$^+$, Ca$^{2+}$ and Cl$^-$) in aqueous solutions are investigated. Water is described using the SPC/E model. A stochastic coarse-grained description for ion behaviour is presented and…
Nucleation phenomena commonly observed in our every day life are of fundamental, technological and societal importance in many areas, but some of their most intimate mechanisms remain however to be unravelled. Crystal nucleation, the early…