Related papers: Shape Selection in Nanopillar Formation
Stochastic growth processes give rise to diverse intricate structures everywhere and across all scales in nature. Despite the seemingly unrelated complex phenomena at their origin, the Laplacian growth theory has succeeded in unifying their…
When flat or on a firm mechanical substrate, the atomic composition and atomistic structure of two-dimensional crystals dictate their chemical, electronic, optical, and mechanical properties. These properties change when the two-dimensional…
The structural properties of packed soft-core particles provide a platform to understand the cross-pollinated physical concepts in solid-state- and soft-matter physics. Confined on spherical surface, the traditional differential geometry…
When phospholipids crystallize within the otherwise fluid membranes of giant unilamellar vesicles, the resulting molecularly-thin "2D" solids exhibit great variety in their morphology evolution. For instance within membranes containing…
I describe a new approach to the classification of snow crystal morphologies that focuses on the most common growth behaviors that appear in normal air under conditions of constant applied temperature and water-vapor supersaturation. The…
We propose a two-scale model to resolve essential features of developmental tissue deformations. The model couples individual cellular behavior to the mechanics at tissue scale. This is realized by a multiphase-field model addressing the…
In recent years, certain molecular crystals have been reported to possess surprising flexibility by undergoing significant elastic or plastic deformation in response to mechanical loads. However, despite this experimental evidence, there…
Impurities in crystalline materials introduce disorder into an otherwise ordered structure due to the formation of lattice defects and grain boundaries. The properties of the resulting polycrystal can differ remarkably from those of the…
Generating novel crystalline materials has the potential to lead to advancements in fields such as electronics, energy storage, and catalysis. The defining characteristic of crystals is their symmetry, which plays a central role in…
Cylindrical interfaces occur in sheared or deformed emulsions and as biological or technological lipid monolayer or bilayer tubules. Like the corresponding spherical droplets and vesicles, these cylinder-like surfaces may host orientaional…
We used molecular dynamics simulations to predict the steady state crystal shape of naphthalene grown from ethanol solution. The simulations were performed at constant supersaturation by utilizing a recently proposed algorithm [Perego et…
Defects are a ubiquitous feature of ordered media. They have certain universal features, independent of the underlying physical system, reflecting their topological origins. While the topological properties of defects are robust, they…
We examine the behavior of spherical silica particles trapped at an air-nematic liquid crystal interface. When a strong normal anchoring is imposed, the beads spontaneously form various structures depending on their area density and the…
Using molecular dynamics calculations and the Voronoi tessellation, we study the evolution of the local structure of a soft-sphere glass versus temperature starting from the liquid phase at different quenching rates. This study is done for…
A miscut (vicinal) crystal surface can be regarded as an array of meandering but non-crossing steps. Interactions between the steps are shown to induce a faceting transition of the surface between a homogeneous Luttinger liquid state and a…
We show that chiral symmetry can be broken spontaneously in one-component systems with isotropic interactions, i.e. many-particle systems having maximal a priori symmetry. This is achieved by designing isotropic potentials that lead to…
Recent experiments on vesicles formed from block copolymers with liquid-crystalline side-chains reveal a rich variety of vesicle morphologies. The additional internal order ("structure") developed by these self-assembled block copolymer…
We address a long-standing problem in colloid and nanoparticle science: particle shape selection in solution synthesis. Our main finding is that a proper balance of two processes, preferential attachment of transported monomers at the…
Quasicrystals are unique materials characterized by long-range order without periodicity. They are observed in systems such as metallic alloys, soft matter, and particle simulations. Unlike periodic crystals, which are invariant under…
Studying shape changing thick surfaces induced by differential growth helps us understand morphogenesis in biology and offers opportunities for device design. While ideal 2D differential growth maps have been well studied for both isotropic…