Related papers: Direct visualization of molecular stacking in quas…
Heterogeneous ice growth exhibits a maximum in freezing rate arising from the competition between kinetics and the thermodynamic driving force between the solid and liquid states. Here, we use molecular dynamics simulations to elucidate the…
Ice Ih has been studied by path-integral molecular dynamics simulations, using the effective q-TIP4P/F potential model for flexible water. This has allowed us to analyze finite-temperature quantum effects in this solid phase from 25 to 300…
Ice crystals growing in highly supersaturated air at temperatures near -5 C exhibit a distinctive, nonplanar dendritic morphology that has not been previously documented or explained. We examine this structure and identify its most…
Water freezes below 0 {\deg}C at ambient pressure, ordinarily to ice Ih with an ABAB... hexagonal stacking sequence. However, it is also known to produce "ice Ic" nominally with an ABCABC... cubic stacking sequence under certain…
The freezing of colloidal suspensions is encountered in many natural and engineering processes such as the freezing of soils, food engineering, and cryobiology. It can also be used as a bio-inspired, versatile, and environmentally-friendly…
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…
Quasicrystals are fascinating structures, characterized by strong positional order but lacking the periodicity of a crystal. In colloidal systems, quasicrystals are typically predicted for particles with complex or highly specific…
Water is one of the most abundant substances on Earth, and ice, i.e., solid water, has more than 18 known phases. Normally ice in nature exists only as Ice Ih, Ice Ic, or a stacking disordered mixture of both. Although many theoretical…
Freely suspended films of smectic liquid crystals are unique examples of quasi two-dimensional fluids. Mechanically stable and with quantized thickness of the order of only a few molecular layers, smectic films are ideal systems for…
Despite relevance to disparate areas such as cloud microphysics and tribology, major gaps in the understanding of the structures and phase transitions of low-dimensional water ice remain. Here we report a first principles study of confined…
We describe a comprehensive model for the formation and morphological development of atmospheric ice crystals growing from water vapor, also known as snow crystals. Our model derives in part from empirical measurements of the intrinsic ice…
Recent technological advances in controlling materials have developed methods to produce idealized two-dimensional (2D) electron systems such as heterogeneous interfaces, molecular-beam-epitaxy (MBE) grown atomic layers, exfoliated thin…
Water freezing is ubiquitous on Earth, affecting many areas from biology to climate science and aviation technology. Probing the atomic structure in the homogeneous ice nucleation process from scratch is of great value but still…
We study a quasi-two-dimensional macroscopic system of magnetic spherical particles settled on a shallow concave dish under a temporally oscillating magnetic field. The system reaches a stationary state where the energy losses from…
We study the phase behaviour of a quasi-two dimensional cholesteric liquid crystal shell. We characterise the topological phases arising close to the isotropic-cholesteric transition, and show that they differ in a fundamental way from…
Ice Ih, the most stable phase of water at ambient pressure, is a stacking of the honeycomb network of water molecules H2O. What if one layer of ice is exfoliated and confined to a two-dimensional (2D) sheet? Martyite Zn3(V2O7)(OH)2 2H2O, a…
The fundamental properties of ice have always attracted a lot of interest due to omnipresence of ice in many different natural contexts. Since cubic ice recently become experimentally accessible from a low-density gas hydrate precursor [1,…
The structure of very high-density amorphous (VHDA) ice has been modelled by positionally disordering three crystalline phases, namely ice IV, VI and XII. These phases were chosen because only they are stable or metastable in the region of…
Under cosmic irradiation, the interstellar water ice mantles evolve towards a compact amorphous state. Crystalline ice amorphisation was previously monitored mainly in the keV to hundreds of keV ion energies. We experimentally investigate…
Polar skyrmions are topologically stable, swirling polarization textures with particle-like characteristics, which hold promise for next-generation, nanoscale logic and memory. While understanding of how to create ordered polar skyrmion…