Related papers: Controlling crystallization: What liquid structure…
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…
Colloidal systems offer the ideal conditions to study the nucleation process, both from an experimental viewpoint, due to their relative large size and long time-scales, and from a modeling point of view, due to the tunability of their…
When a system undergoes a transition from a liquid to a solid phase, it passes through multiple intermediate structures before reaching the final state. However, our knowledge on the exact pathways of this process is limited, mainly due to…
Targeting specific technological applications requires the control of nanoparticle properties, especially the crystalline polymorph. Freezing a nanodroplet deposited on a solid substrate leads to the formation of crystalline structures. We…
Crystallization is a key step in macromolecular structure determination by crystallography. While a robust theoretical treatment of the process is available, due to the complexity of the system, the experimental process is still largely one…
Studying the crystallization process of silicon is a challenging task since empirical potentials are not able to reproduce well the properties of both semiconducting solid and metallic liquid. On the other hand, nucleation is a rare event…
According to classical nucleation theory, a crystal grows from a small nucleus that already bears the symmetry of its end phase - but experiments with colloids now reveal that, from an amorphous precursor, crystallites with different…
Control of the crystallization process is central to developing novel materials with atomic precision to meet the demands of electronic and quantum technology applications. Semiconductor nanowires grown by the vapor-liquid-solid process are…
The ability to control the crystallization behaviour (including its absence) of particles, be they biomolecules such as globular proteins, inorganic colloids, nanoparticles, or metal atoms in an alloy, is of both fundamental and…
When an ice crystal is born from liquid water two key changes occur: (i) the molecules order; and (ii) the mobility of the molecules drops as they adopt their lattice positions. Most research on ice nucleation (and crystallization in…
NaCl crystal nucleation from metastable solutions has long been considered to occur according to a single-step mechanism. Recent experimental observations suggest that NaCl crystals emerge from disordered intermediates which is seemingly at…
Heterogeneous nucleation is a process wherein extrinsic impurities facilitate freezing by lowering nucleation barriers and constitutes the dominant mechanism for crystallization in most systems. Classical nucleation theory (\textsc{Cnt})…
One of most intriguing problems of heterogeneous crystal nucleation in droplets is its strong enhancement in the contact mode (when the foreign particle is presumably in some kind of contact with the droplet surface) compared to the…
Liquid crystals have attracted enormous interest because of the variety of their phases and richness of their application. The interplay of general physical symmetries and specific molecular features generates a myriad of different…
A few experiments have already detected the presence of icosahedral superclusters in undercooled liquids, confirming a possible homogeneous nucleation of such entities as suggested by Franck. These superclusters survive in melts above the…
Classical theories of crystal nucleation and growth from the liquid assume activated processes that are interface limited, with the atoms individually joining the growing interface by jumps that occur at a rate that is determined by the…
The interplay between densification and positional ordering during the process of crystal nucleation is a greatly investigated topic. Even for the simplest colloidal model -- hard spheres -- there has been much debate regarding the…
Motivated by unexpected morphologies of the emerging liquid phase (channels, bulges, droplets) at the edge of thin, melting alkane terraces, we propose a new heterogeneous nucleation pathway. The competition between bulk and interfacial…
Nucleation plays a critical role in the birth of crystals and is associated with a vast array of phenomena such as protein crystallization and ice formation in clouds. Despite numerous experimental and theoretical studies, many aspects of…
We present a computer simulation study on the crystal nucleation process in suspensions of hard spheres, fully taking into account the solvent hydrodynamics. If the dynamics of collodial crystallization were purely diffusive, the crystal…