Related papers: Crystal nucleation rates in one-component Yukawa s…
Crystallization from a supercooled liquid initially proceeds via the formation of a small solid embryo (nucleus), which requires surmounting an activation barrier. This phenomenon is most easily studied by numerical simulation, using…
We study the formation of a superfluid condensate of neutrinos inside a neutrino cluster. The attractive interaction between neutrinos is mediated by a scalar boson which is lighter than a neutrino. We consider the appearance of neutrino…
Crystal growth and crystal coalescence processes in supercooled systems strongly depend on the concentration of crystallization centers. We perform atomistic dynamics simulations of the crystallization process in the ultrathin metallic film…
Over the past two decades, a large number of studies addressed the topic of crystal nucleation in suspensions of hard spheres. The shared result of all these efforts is that, at low super-saturations, experimentally observed nucleation…
A few experiments have already detected the presence of icosahedral superclusters in undercooled liquids, confirming a possible homogeneous nucleation of such entities as suggested by Franck. These superclusters survive in melts above the…
Cooling white dwarfs (WDs) can yield accurate ages when theoretical cooling models fully account for the physics of the dense plasma of WD interiors. We use MESA to investigate cooling models for a set of massive and ultra-massive WDs…
It was predicted more than 40 years ago that the cores of the coolest white dwarf stars should eventually crystallize. This effect is one of the largest sources of uncertainty in white dwarf cooling models, which are now routinely used to…
Simulations are reported to investigate solid superheating and liquid supercooling of two-dimensional (2D) systems with a Yukawa interparticle potential. Motivated by experiments where a dusty plasma is heated and then cooled suddenly, we…
A widely spread method of crystal preparation is to precipitate it from a supersaturated solution. In such a process, control of solution concentration is of paramount importance. Nucleation process, polymorph selection, and crystal habits…
A systematic search for multicomponent crystal structures is carried out for five different ternary systems of nuclei in a polarizable background of electrons, representative of accreted neutron star crusts and some white dwarfs. Candidate…
In recent decades, computer simulations have found increasingly widespread use as powerful tools of studying phase transitions in wide variety of systems. In the particular and very important case of aqueous systems, the commonly used…
In this review, an overview of structural properties and phase transitions in finite spherical dusty (complex) plasma crystals -- so-called Yukawa balls -- is given. These novel kinds of Wigner crystals can be directly analyzed…
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…
Homogeneous nucleation from aluminum (Al) melt was investigated by million-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations utilizing the second nearest neighbor modified embedded atom method (MEAM) potentials. The natural spontaneous homogenous…
Small three-dimensional strongly coupled clusters of charged particles in a spherical confinement potential arrange themselves in nested concentric shells. If the particles are immersed into a background plasma the interaction is screened.…
Controlled crystallization, melting and vitrification are important fundamental processes in nature and technology. However, the microscopic details of these fundamental phenomena still lack understanding, in particular how the cooling rate…
In the study of crystal nucleation via computer simulations, hard spheres are arguably the most extensively explored model system. Nonetheless, even in this simple model system, the complex thermodynamics of crystal nuclei can sometimes…
We propose an approximation for the total ice nucleation rate J=J(T,R) in supercooled water droplets as a function of both droplet radius R and temperature T, taking account of both volume-based and surface-stimulated nucleation modes. Its…
The first solids that form as a white dwarf (WD) starts to crystallize are expected to be greatly enriched in actinides. Previously [PRL 126, 1311010] we found that these solids might support a nuclear fission chain reaction that could…
Diffusion in Yukawa crystals is stochastic due to the thermally activated formation of vacancy-interstitial pairs, which have poor statistics in simulations. This makes it difficult to argue if Yukawa crystals exhibit normal diffusion, or…