Related papers: Fertile metastability
The discovery of topological semimetal phase in three-dimensional (3D) systems is a new breakthrough in topological material research. Dirac nodal-line semimetal is one of the three topological semimetal phases discovered so far; it is…
Experiments reveal that structural transitions in thin sheets are mediated by the passage of transient and stable mobile localized elastic excitations. These ``crumples'' or ``d-cones'' nucleate, propagate, interact, annihilate, and escape.…
Colloidal interactions in nematic liquid crystals can be described as interactions between elastic multipoles that depend on particle shape, topology, chirality, boundary conditions and induced topological defects. Here, we describe a…
Despite their considerable practical and biological applications, the link between molecular properties, assembly conditions and self-organized structure in confined polymer solutions remains elusive. Here, we explore the lyotropic nematic…
For a large class of fluids exhibiting ultrasoft bounded pair potentials, particles form crystals consisting of clusters located in the lattice sites, with a density-independent lattice constant. Here we present an investigation on the…
The most energetically favourable arrangement of low-density electrons in an infinite two-dimensional plane is the ordered triangular Wigner lattice. However, in most instances of contemporary interest one deals instead with finite clusters…
Correlated electron systems that host multiple electronic orders offer routes to multifunctional quantum materials, but strong competition between these orders often prevents their coexistence. Here we show that nanoscale, metastable…
The settling of highly elastic non-Brownian closed fibres (called loops) under gravity in a viscous fluid is investigated numerically. The loops are represented using a bead-spring model with harmonic bending potential and finitely…
Nucleation, commonly associated with discontinuous transformations between metastable and stable phases, is crucial in fields as diverse as atmospheric science and nanoscale electronics. Traditionally, it is considered a microscopic process…
For layered materials, the interlayer stacking is a critical degree of freedom tuning electronic properties, while its microscopic characterization faces great challenges. The transition-metal dichalcogenide 1T-TaS$_2$ represents a novel…
We study the folding process in the shallowly knotted protein MJ0366 within two variants of a structure-based model. We observe that the resulting topological pathways are much richer than identified in previous studies. In addition to the…
Understanding the mechanism of martensitic transformation is of great importance in developing advanced high strength steels, especially TRansformation-Induced Plasticity (TRIP) steels. The TRIP effect leads to enhanced work-hardening rate,…
Dinuclear systems that occur in the post-saddle to scission stage in nuclear fission process are special transient formations. The diabatic evolution at this stage is studied using the methods of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. A novel…
The phase separation mechanism of a binary liquid mixture off-critically quenched in its miscibility gap is nucleation and growth, its homogeneous phase reaching a metastable equilibrium state. The successive stages of growth of the…
We provide a minimal continuum model for mesoscale plasticity, explaining the cellular dislocation structures observed in deformed crystals. Our dislocation density tensor evolves from random, smooth initial conditions to form self-similar…
Non-aligning self-propelled particles with purely repulsive excluded volume interactions undergo athermal motility-induced phase separation into a dilute gas and a dense cluster phase. Here, we use enhanced sampling computational methods…
Loops are essential secondary structure elements in folded DNA and RNA molecules and proliferate close to the melting transition. Using a theory for nucleic acid secondary structures that accounts for the logarithmic entropy c ln m for a…
Reptation theory has been highly successful in explaining the unusual material properties of entangled polymer solutions. It reduces the complex many-body dynamics to a single-polymer description where each polymer is envisaged to be…
We investigate the buckling and post-buckling properties of a hyperelastic half-space coated by two hyperelastic layers when the composite structure is subjected to a uniaxial compression. In the case of a half-space coated with a {\it…
The ability to tune the microstructures formed by block copolymers using accessible physical approaches provides control for practical material applications. A common strategy involves the addition of homopolymers, which can induce…