Related papers: Kinetics of Stacking Order Evolution During Hetero…
A collection of thin structures buckle, bend, and bump into each-other when confined. This contact can lead to the formation of patterns: hair will self-organize in curls; DNA strands will layer into cell nuclei; paper, when crumpled, will…
Understanding and controlling physical aging, i.e. the spontaneous temporal evolution of out-of-equilibrium systems, represents one of the greatest tasks in material science. Recent studies have revealed the existence of a complex atomic…
Structural aspects of crystal nucleation in undercooled liquids are explored using a nonlinear hydrodynamic theory of crystallization proposed recently [G. I. Toth et al., J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 26, 055001 (2014)], which is based on…
Nucleation plays a critical role in the birth of crystals and is associated with a vast array of phenomena such as protein crystallization and ice formation in clouds. Despite numerous experimental and theoretical studies, many aspects of…
The microscopic mechanisms controlling heterogeneous ice nucleation are complex and remain poorly understood. Although good ice nucleators are generally believed to match ice lattice and to bind water, counter examples are often identified.…
We introduce a minimal model of solid-forming anisotropic molecules that displays, in thermal equilibrium, surface orientational order without bulk orientational order. The model reproduces the nonequilibrium behavior of recent experiments…
Ice-templating is a well-established processing route for porous ceramics. Because of the structure/properties relationships, it is essential to better understand and control the solidification microstructures. Ice-templating is based on…
Targeting specific technological applications requires the control of nanoparticle properties, especially the crystalline polymorph. Freezing a nanodroplet deposited on a solid substrate leads to the formation of crystalline structures. We…
Structural defects in a crystal are responsible for the "two length-scale" behavior, in which a sharp central peak is superimposed over a broad peak in critical diffuse X-ray scattering. We have previously measured the scaling behavior of…
The premelting of ice is well known, but little is known about how the premelted and solid surfaces convert to each other. In this work, the transition dynamics between two phases are revealed with large-scale molecular dynamics…
We investigate the large-scale structure of amorphous ices and transitions between their different forms by quantifying their large-scale density fluctuations. Specifically, we simulate the isothermal compression of low-density amorphous…
Bifurcations in kinetic pathways decide the evolution of a system. An example is crystallization, in which the thermodynamically stable polymorph may not form due to kinetic hindrance. Here, we use confined self-assembly to investigate the…
Phase transformations such as freezing typically start with heterogeneous nucleation. Heterogeneous nucleation near a wetting transition, of a crystalline phase is studied. The wetting transition occurs at or near a vapour-liquid transition…
Exploring structural order in disordered systems including liquids and glasses is an intriguing but challenging issue in condensed matter physics. Here we construct a new parameter based on the angular distribution function of particles and…
We study the morphological evolution of strained islands in growing crystal films by use of a continuum description including wetting, elasticity and deposition flux. Wetting breaks translational invariance, allowing the flux to tune…
Ice I has three forms depending on the stacking arrangements of its layers: hexagonal ice Ih, cubic ice Ic, and stacking disordered ice Isd. Below ~60 K, amorphous water becomes metastable, and the formation of any form of ice I is often…
A novel kind of crystal order in high-density nanoconfined bilayer ice is proposed from molecular dynamics and density-functional theory simulations. A first-order transition is observed between a low-temperature proton-ordered solid and a…
A spontaneous buckling transition in thin layers of monodomain nematic liquid crystalline gel was observed by polarized light microscopy. The coupling between the orientational ordering of liquid crystalline solvent and the translational…
Granular crystallisation is an important phenomenon whereby ordered packing structures form in granular matter under vibration. However, compared with the well-developed principles of crystallisation at the atomic scale, crystallisation in…
Based on neutron wide-angle diffraction and small-angle neutron scattering experiments, we show that there is a correlation between the preparational conditions of amorphous ice structures, their microscopic structural properties, the…