Related papers: Phase behavior and crystal nucleation of hard tria…
Despite its fundamental and technological importance, a microscopic understanding of the crystallization process is still elusive. By computer simulations of the hard-sphere model we reveal the mechanism by which thermal fluctuations drive…
Understanding the pathways to crystallization during the deposition of a vapor phase on a cold solid substrate is of great interest in industry, e.g., for the realization of electronic devices made of crystallites-free glassy materials, as…
We study the spontaneous nucleation and crystallization of linear and cyclic chains of flexibly connected hard spheres using extensive molecular dynamics simulations. To this end, we present a novel event-driven molecular dynamics…
The kinetic mechanisms underlying bottom-up assembly of colloidal particles have been widely investigated in efforts to control crystallization pathways and to direct growth into targeted superstructures for applications including photonic…
We study an experimental system of hard granular squares in two dimensions, energized by vibration. The interplay of order in the orientations and positions of anisotropic particles allows for a rich set of phases. We measure the structure…
We review how phase-field models contributed to the understanding of various aspects of crystal nucleation including homogeneous and heterogeneous processes, and their role in microstructure evolution. We recall results obtained both by the…
We use numerical simulations to study the crystallization of monodisperse systems of hard aspherical particles. We find that particle shape and crystallizability can be easily related to each other when particles are characterized in terms…
Crystallization and vitrification of tetrahedral liquids are important both from a fundamental and a technological point of view. Here, we study via extensive umbrella sampling Monte Carlo computer simulations the nucleation barriers for a…
Hard convex polyhedra, idealized models for anisotropic colloids and nanoparticles, are known to form variety of orientational phases despite the regular arrangement of particles in the crystalline assemblies. Based on the orientational…
We consider homogeneous crystallisation rates in confocal microscopy experiments on colloidal nearly hard spheres at the single particle level. These we compare with Brownian dynamics simuations by carefully modelling the softness in the…
We study numerically the crystallization of a hard-sphere mixture with 8\% polydispersity. Although often used as a model glass former, for small system sizes we observe crystallization in molecular dynamics simulations. This opens the…
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…
Viscoelastic phase separation of colloidal suspensions can be interrupted to form gels either by glass transition or by crystallization. With a new confocal microscopy protocol, we follow the entire kinetics of phase separation, from…
Crystal nucleation and growth processes induced by an externally applied shear strain in a model metallic glass are studied by means of nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations, in a range of temperatures. We observe that the…
Dating from experiments more than 20 years ago, it has been realized that the crystallization of hard colloidal particles in the vicinity of dynamical arrest has several anomalies, that render the conventional nucleation and growth model…
Combining three numerical methods (forward flux sampling, seeding of droplets, and finite size droplets), we probe the crystallization of hard spheres over the full range from close to coexistence to the spinodal regime. We show that all…
Self-propelled particles can spontaneously form dense phases from a dilute suspension in a process referred to as motility-induced phase separation. The properties of the out-of-equilibrium structures that are formed are governed by the…
We investigate the self-assembly (crystallisation) of particles with hard cores and isotropic, square-well interactions, using a Monte Carlo scheme to simulate overdamped Langevin dynamics. We measure correlation and response functions…
Despite numerous efforts from numerical approaches to complement experimental measurements, several fundamental challenges have still hindered one's ability to truly provide an atomistic picture of the nucleation process in nanocrystals.…
The nucleation of crystals from the liquid melt is often characterized by a competition between different crystalline structures or polymorphs, and can result in nuclei with heterogeneous compositions. These mixed-phase nuclei can display…