Related papers: A first-principles machine-learning force field fo…
Mineral dust aerosols strongly influence Earth's climate by acting as ice-nucleating particles (INPs). Feldspar minerals, particularly K-feldspar, are recognized as dominant INPs, and a previous study attributed this behavior to (100)…
Molecular simulations have provided valuable insight into the microscopic mechanisms underlying homogeneous ice nucleation. While empirical models have been used extensively to study this phenomenon, simulations based on first-principles…
Microcline feldspar (KAlSi$_3$O$_8$) is a common mineral with important roles for Earth's ecological balance. It participates in the carbon, potassium, and water cycles, contributing to CO$_2$ sequestration, soil formation, and atmospheric…
Despite its importance in atmospheric science, much remains unknown about the microscopic mechanism of heterogeneous ice nucleation. In this work, we perform hybrid Monte Carlo simulations of the heterogeneous nucleation of ice on a range…
Ice formation is one of the most common and important processes on earth and almost always occurs at the surface of a material. A basic understanding of how the physicochemical properties of a material's surface affect its ability to form…
Understanding the molecular-level structure and dynamics of ice surfaces is crucial for deciphering several chemical, physical, and atmospheric processes. Vibrational sum-frequency generation (SFG) spectroscopy is the most prominent tool…
In this work, we perform a systematic computer simulation study of ice premelting, and explore the thickness and structure of quasi-liquid layers formed at the interface of ice with substrates of different hydrophilicity. Our study shows…
Freezing is a fundamental physical phenomenon that has been studied over many decades; yet the role played by surfaces in determining nucleation has remained elusive. Here we report direct computational evidence of surface induced…
Machine learning models are rapidly becoming widely used to simulate complex physicochemical phenomena with ab initio accuracy. Here, we use one such model as well as direct density functional theory (DFT) calculations to investigate the…
Predicting the adsorption affinity of a small molecule to a target surface is of importance to a range of fields, from catalysis to drug delivery and human safety, but a complex task to perform computationally when taking into account the…
What makes a material a good ice nucleating agent? Despite the importance of heterogeneous ice nucleation to a variety of fields, from cloud science to microbiology, major gaps in our understanding of this ubiquitous process still prevent…
Coarse grained molecular dynamics simulations are presented in which the sensitivity of the ice nucleation rate to the hydrophilicity of a graphene nanoflake is investigated. We find that an optimal interaction strength for promoting ice…
Machine learning algorithms have recently emerged as a tool to generate force fields which display accuracies approaching the ones of the ab-initio calculations they are trained on, but are much faster to compute. The enhanced computational…
Ice-infiltrated sediment, known as a frozen fringe, leads to phenomena such as frost heave, ice lenses, and meters of debris-rich ice under glaciers. Understanding the dynamics of frozen fringe development is important as frost heave is…
Ice-nucleating proteins (INPs) are a unique class of biological macromolecules that catalyze the freezing of supercooled water far more efficiently than homogeneous nucleation. Their remarkable efficiency has motivated applications across…
Recently, machine learning has emerged as an alternative, powerful approach for predicting quantum-mechanical properties of molecules and solids. Here, using kernel ridge regression and atomic fingerprints representing local environments of…
The prevalence of heterogeneous nucleation in nature was explained qualitatively by the classical theory for heterogeneous nucleation established over more than 60 years ago, but the quantitative validity and the key conclusions of the…
We show that classical molecular density functional theory (MDFT), here in the homogeneous reference fluid approximation in which the functional is inferred from the properties of the bulk solvent, is a powerful new tool to study, at a…
The microphysical properties of ice crystals are important because they significantly alter the radiative properties and spatiotemporal distributions of clouds, which in turn strongly affect Earth's climate. However, it is challenging to…
We report results of long timescale adaptive kinetic Monte Carlo simulations aimed at identifying possible molecular reordering processes on both proton-disordered and ordered (Fletcher) basal plane (0001) surfaces of hexagonal ice. The…