Related papers: Entropy-Driven Preordering Assists Nucleation in P…
We present a kinetic model of crystal growth of polymers of finite molecular weight. Experiments help to classify polymer crystallization broadly into two kinetic regimes. One is observed in melts or in high molar mass polymer solutions and…
Kinetic barriers cause polymers to crystallize incompletely, into nanoscale lamellae interleaved with amorphous regions. As a result, crystalline polymers are full of crystal-melt interfaces, which dominate their physical properties. The…
So-called polar liquid crystals possess spontaneous long-range mutual orientation of their electric dipole moments, conferring bulk polarity to fluid phases of matter. The combination of polarity and fluidity leads to complex phase…
Phase separation of sequence-disordered liquid crystalline polymers, a promising class of technological and biological relevance, is studied by field theory, and thermodynamic mechanisms responsible for orientational ordering observed in…
Configurational entropy is an important factor in the free energy change of many macromolecular recognition and binding processes, and has been intensively studied. Despite great progresses that have been made, the global sampling remains…
Whereas entropy can induce phase behavior that is as rich as seen in energetic systems, microphase separation remains a very rare phenomenon in entropic systems. In this paper, we present a density functional approach to study the…
Ethanol-water mixtures are a classic example of thermodynamic non-ideality, yet the structural origin of their pronounced anomalies, such as volume contraction and a large negative excess entropy, has remained a long-standing puzzle. Here,…
Inspired by the swarming or flocking of animal systems we study groups of agents moving in unbounded 2D space. Individual trajectories derive from a ``bottom-up'' principle: individuals reorient to maximise their future path entropy over…
The study of intelligent systems explains behaviour in terms of economic rationality. This results in an optimization principle involving a function or utility, which states that the system will evolve until the configuration of maximum…
In this study, we propose a theoretical framework to investigate the interactions between flexible polymer chains, specifically polyelectrolytes (PEs). By calculating the system's free energy while considering position-dependent mutual…
Sintering refers to particle coalescence by heat, which has been known as a thermal phenomenon involving all aspects of natural science for centuries. It is particularly important in heterogeneous catalysis because normally sintering…
We investigate the atomistic mechanism of homogeneous nucleation during solidification in molybdenum employing transition path sampling. The mechanism is characterized by the formation of a pre-structured region of high bond-orientational…
The kinetics of dislocation reactions, such as dislocation multiplication, controls the plastic deformation in crystals beyond their elastic limit, therefore critical mechanisms in a number of applications in materials science. We present a…
Glass transition is accompanied by a rapid growth of the structural relaxation time and a concomitant decrease of configurational entropy. It remains unclear whether the transition has a thermodynamic origin, and whether the dynamic arrest…
The nucleation of crystals is a prominent phenomenon in science and technology that still lacks a full atomic-scale understanding. Much work has been devoted to identifying order parameters able to track the process, from the inception of…
Entropy production along a single stochastic trajectory of a biomolecule is discussed for two different sources of non-equilibrium. For a molecule manipulated mechanically by an AFM or an optical tweezer, entropy production (or…
Over the past decades, research on two-dimensional melting has established that both first-order and continuous hexatic-liquid transitions can occur, influenced by various factors in the potential energy and system details. The fundamental…
We analyze the saturation value of the bipartite entanglement and number entropy starting from a random product state deep in the MBL phase. By studying the probability distributions of these entropies we find that the growth of the…
Currently, identification of crystallization pathways in polymers is being carried out using molecular simulation-based data on a preset cut-off point on a single order parameter (OP) to define nucleated or crystallized regions. Aside from…
Understanding nonequilibrium systems and the consequences of irreversibility for the system's behavior as compared to the equilibrium case, is a fundamental question in statistical physics. Here, we investigate two types of nonequilbrium…