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The Bernal-Fowler ice rules stipulate that each water molecule in an ice crystal should form four hydrogen bonds. However, in extreme or constrained conditions, the arrangement of water molecules deviates from conventional ice rules,…
We show that condensation is an efficient particle growth mechanism, leading to growth beyond decimeter-sized pebbles close to an ice line in protoplanetary discs. As coagulation of dust particles is frustrated by bouncing and…
Icy grain mantles are commonly observed through infrared spectroscopy toward dense clouds, cloud cores, protostellar envelopes and protoplanetary disks. Up to 80% of the available oxygen, carbon and nitrogen are found in such ices; the most…
We investigate the solidification of a water rivulet flowing over a cold inclined substrate and the resulting formation of three-dimensional ice structures. Using a controlled hydraulic and thermal setup, combined with spatiotemporal…
The crystal-melt interfaces of a binary hard-sphere fluid mixture in coexistence with a single-component hard-sphere crystal is investigated using molecular-dynamics simulation. In the system under study, the fluid phase consists of a…
Water is the main component of interstellar ice mantles, is abundant in the solar system and is a crucial ingredient for life. The formation of this molecule in the interstellar medium cannot be explained by gas-phase chemistry only and its…
We investigated the structural and dynamical properties of a tetrahedrally coordinated crystalline ice from first principles based on density functional theory within the generalized gradient approximation with the projected augmented wave…
The knowledge of the binding energy of molecules on astrophysically relevant ices can help to obtain an estimate of the desorption rate, i.e. the molecules residence time on the surface. This represents an important parameter for…
We present results of classical dynamics calculations, performed to study the photodissociation of water in crystalline and amorphous ice surfaces at a surface temperature of 10 K. Dissociation in the top six monolayers is considered.…
Recent interferometer observations have found that the D2O/HDO abundance ratio is higher than that of HDO/H2O by about one order of magnitude in the vicinity of low-mass protostar NGC 1333-IRAS 2A, where water ice has sublimated. Previous…
An increasing variety of crystal structures has been observed in soft condensed matter over the past two decades, surpassing most expectations for the diversity of arrangements accessible through classical driving forces. Here, we survey…
Context. The chemical evolution of formamide (HCONH2), a molecule of astrobiological interest that has been tentatively identified in interstellar ices and in cometary coma, has been studied in laboratory under simulated astrophysical…
Hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) has long been recognized as an ideal substrate for electronic devices due to its dangling-bond-free surface, insulating nature and thermal/chemical stability. Therefore, to analyse the lattice structure and…
Highly crystallized undoped hydrogenated microcrystalline silicon films prepared using SiF4-H2 mixture plasma were investigated at various stages of growth employing different microstructural probes. Our self-consistent results elucidate…
We describe an experimental apparatus for making detailed morphological observations of the growth of isolated plate-like ice crystals from water vapor. Each crystal develops a plate-on-pedestal (POP) geometry, in which a large, thin,…
The majority of hydrogen in the interstellar medium (ISM) is in atomic form. The transition from atoms to molecules and, in particular, the formation of the H$_2$ molecule, is a key step in cosmic structure formation en route to stars.…
Using a well defined soft model glass in the framework of Molecular Dynamics simulations, the inherent structures are probed by means of a recently developed deformation protocol that aims to capture the Dynamical Heterogeneities (DH), as…
Polygonal desiccation crack patterns are commonly observed in natural systems. Despite their quotidian nature, it is unclear whether similar crack patterns which span orders of magnitude in length scales share the same underlying physics.…
One of water's unsolved puzzles is the question of what determines the lowest temperature to which it can be cooled before freezing to ice. The supercooled liquid has been probed experimentally to near the homogeneous nucleation temperature…
We investigate with computer simulations the effect of applying an electric field on the water-to-ice transition. We use a combination of state-of-the-art simulation techniques to obtain phase boundaries and crystal growth rates (direct…