Related papers: Fertile metastability
The transport of deformable particles through porous media underlies a wealth of applications ranging from filtration to oil recovery to the transport and spreading of biological agents. Using direct numerical simulations, we analyze the…
Twisted and rope-like assemblies of filamentous molecules are common and vital structural elements in cells and tissue of living organisms. We study the intrinsic frustration occurring in these materials between the two-dimensional…
We address the folding induced by differential growth in soft layered solids via an elementary model that consists of a soft growing neo-Hookean elastic layer adhered to a deep elastic substrate. As the layer/substrate modulus ratio is…
In layered materials, a common mode of deformation involves buckling of the layers under tensile deformation in the direction perpendicular to the layers. The instability mechanism, which operates in elastic materials from geological to…
A mesoscopic continuum model is employed to analyse the transport mechanisms and structure formation during the redistribution stage of deposition experiments where organic molecules are deposited on a solid substrate with periodic…
A computational framework is presented for the sampling of the energy surface of magnetic systems via the systematic identification of first-order saddle points that determine connectivity of metastable states and define the mechanisms of…
Certain bacteria form filamentous colonies when the cells fail to separate after dividing. In Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus thermus, and cyanobacteria, the filaments can wrap into complex supercoiled structures as the cells grow. The…
We have studied structure formation in a confined block copolymer melt by means of dynamic density functional theory (DDFT). The confinement is two-dimensional, and the confined geometry is that of a cylindrical nanopore. Although the…
We study the metastability and nucleation of the Blume-Capel model on complex networks, in which each node can take one of three possible spin variables $\left\{ {-1, 0, 1} \right\}$. We consider the external magnetic field $h$ to be…
Dislocation nucleation in homogeneous crystals initially unfolds as a linear symmetry-breaking elastic instability. In the absence of explicit nucleation centers, such instability develops simultaneously all over the crystal and due to the…
This thesis can be divided into two independent parts. In the first part of this thesis, we focus on studying the kinetic pathways of nucleation in colloidal systems. In Chapter 2, we briefly introduce the relevant theory of nucleation,…
The application of a sufficiently strong strain perpendicular to the pitch axis of a monodomain cholesteric elastomer unwinds the cholesteric helix. Previous theoretical analyses of this transition ignored the effects of Frank elasticity…
Quasicrystals (QCs) are a class of aperiodic ordered structures that emerge in various systems, from metallic alloys to soft matter and driven non-equilibrium systems. Within a mesoscale theory based on slowly-varying complex amplitudes for…
We develop a theoretical description of the topological disentanglement occurring when torus knots reach the ends of a semi-flexible polymer under tension. These include decays into simpler knots and total unknotting. The minimal number of…
Colloids dispersed in nematic liquid crystals form topological composites in which colloid-associated defects mediate interactions while adhering to fundamental topological constraints. Better realising the promise of such materials…
Smectic liquid crystals are charcterized by layers that have a preferred uniform spacing and vanishing curvature in their ground state. Dislocations in the smectics play an important role in phase nucleation, layer reorientation, and…
When a nematic liquid crystal is confined in a porous medium with strong anchoring conditions, topological defects, called disclinations, are stably formed with numerous possible configurations. Since the energy barriers between them are…
Topological nodal-line semimetals exhibit double or fourfold degenerate nodal lines, which are protected by symmetries. Here, we investigate the possibility of the existence of triply degenerate nodal lines in metals. We present two types…
In many systems, nucleation of a stable solid may occur in the presence of other (often more than one) metastable phases. These may be polymorphic solids or even liquid phases. In such cases, nucleation of the solid phase from the melt may…
By analytically solving some simple models of phase-ordering kinetics, we suggest a mechanism for the onset of non-equilibrium behaviour in colloid-polymer mixtures. These mixtures can function as models of atomic systems; their physics…