Related papers: Kinetics of Stacking Order Evolution During Hetero…
Nucleation is an activated process in which the system has to overcome a free energy barrier in order for a first-order phase transition between the metastable and the stable phases to take place. In the liquid-to-solid transition the…
Water ice's remarkable properties make it an important material across a range of disciplines. The combination of covalent and hydrogen bonds form a long-range lattice of oxygens, which hosts a disordered yet correlated hydrogen network. We…
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…
Snow crystals growing from water vapor occasionally exhibit morphologies with three-fold (trigonal) symmetry, even though the ice crystal lattice has a molecular structure with six-fold symmetry. In extreme cases, thin platelike snow…
Despite its importance in atmospheric science, much remains unknown about the microscopic mechanism of heterogeneous ice nucleation. In this work, we perform hybrid Monte Carlo simulations of the heterogeneous nucleation of ice on a range…
Due to the lack of long-range order, it remains challenging to characterize the structure of disordered solids and understand the nature of the glass transition. Here we propose a new structural order parameter by taking into account…
We describe a novel crystal growth instability that enhances the development of thin edges, promoting the formation of plate-like or hollow columnar morphologies. This instability arises when diffusion-limited growth is coupled with…
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…
Ice nucleation is a process of great relevance in physics, chemistry, technology and environmental sciences, much theoretical and experimental efforts have been devoted to its understanding, but still it remains a topic of intense research.…
Solid particles in protoplanetary discs can grow by direct vapour deposition outside of ice lines. The presence of microscopic silicate particles may nevertheless hinder growth into large pebbles, since the available vapour is deposited…
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 possibility to align and organize faceted particles in the bulk offers intriguing possibilities for the design and discovery of materials and architectures exhibiting novel functional properties. The growth of ice crystals can be used…
Ice growth has attracted great attention for its capability of fabricating hierarchically porous microstructure. However, the formation of tilted lamellar microstructure during freezing needs to be reconsidered due to the limited control of…
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…
Dislocation nucleation in homogeneous crystals initially unfolds as a linear symmetry-breaking elastic instability. In the absence of explicit nucleation centers, such instability develops simultaneously all over the crystal and due to the…
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…
In many growth processes particles are highly mobile in an active layer at the surface, but are relatively immobile once incorporated in the bulk. We study models in which atoms are allowed to interact, equilibrate, and order on the…
The freezing of colloidal suspensions is encountered in many natural and engineering processes. It can be harnessed through a process known as ice templating, to produce porous materials and composites exhibiting unique functional…
We use a hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm to simulate the shaking of spheres at different vibrational amplitudes, and find that spontaneous crystallisation occurs in specific dynamical regimes. Several crystallising transitions are typically…
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…