Related papers: Liquid-state structural asymmetry governs species-…
Transformations accompanying shape-instability govern the morphological configuration and distribution of the phases in a microstructure. Owing to the influence of the microstructure on the properties of a material, the stability of…
Rapid solidification leads to unique microstructural features, where a less studied topic is the formation of various crystalline defects, including high dislocation densities, as well as gradients and splitting of the crystalline…
Given the multitude of growth habits, pronounced sensitivity to ambient conditions and wide range of scales involved, snowflake crystals are one of the most challenging systems to model. The present work focuses on the development and…
Colloids are abundant in nature, science and technology, with examples ranging from milk to quantum dots and the "colloidal atom" paradigm. Similarly, liquid crystal ordering is important in contexts ranging from biological membranes to…
Multistability is a phenomenon prevalent in many natural systems. In climate, for example, it allows the possibility of irreversible consequences on planetary scale as a result of climate change. Indeed, a climate ``tipping element'' is a…
The acoustic levitation of small particles provides a versatile platform to investigate the collective dynamical properties of self-assembled many-body systems in the presence of hydrodynamic coupling. However, acoustic scattering forces…
Aims. Atomic diffusion, including the effect of radiative accelerations on individual elements, leads to important variations of the chemical composition inside the stars. The accumulation in specific layers of the elements, which are the…
Amorphous solids are mechanically rigid while possessing a disordered structure similar to that of dense liquids. Recent research indicates that dynamical heterogeneity, spatio-temporal fluctuations in local dynamical behavior, might help…
Dominating finite-range interactions in many-body systems can lead to intriguing self-ordered phases of matter. Well known examples are crystalline solids or Coulomb crystals in ion traps. In those systems, crystallization proceeds via a…
When a system undergoes a transition from a liquid to a solid phase, it passes through multiple intermediate structures before reaching the final state. However, our knowledge on the exact pathways of this process is limited, mainly due to…
A definition of structural diversity, adapted from the biodiversity literature, is introduced to provide a general characterization of structures of condensed matter. Using the Favored Local Structure (FLS) lattice model as a testbed, the…
Interface energy and kinetic coefficient of crystal growth strongly depend on the face of the crystalline lattice. To investigate the kinetic anisotropy and velocity of different crystallographic faces we use the hyperbolic (modified) phase…
Phase separation in passive systems leads to uncontrolled droplet growth, limiting structural control in soft materials and cells. We identify a generic mechanism to arrest coarsening based on chemical interconversion between molecular…
It has recently been shown that identical, isotropic particles can form complex crystals and quasicrystals. In order to understand the relation between the particle interaction and the structure, which it stabilizes, the phase behavior of a…
How thousands of microtubules and molecular motors self-organize into spindles remains poorly understood. By combining static, nanometer-resolution, large-scale electron tomography reconstructions and dynamic, optical-resolution, polarized…
A novel method for crystal structure prediction, based on metadynamics and evolutionary algorithms, is presented here. This technique can be used to produce efficiently both the ground state and metastable states easily reachable from a…
Site-occupancy disorder, defined as the non-periodic occupation of lattice sites in a crystal structure, is a ubiquitous phenomenon in solid-state physics and chemistry. Examples are mineral solid solutions, synthetic non-stoichiometric…
Time crystals are many-body systems whose ground state spontaneously breaks time-translation symmetry and thus exhibits long-range spatiotemporal order and robust periodic motion. Using hydrodynamics, we have recently shown how an…
We develop a nonlinear, three-dimensional phase field model for crystal plasticity which accounts for the infinite and discrete symmetry group G of the underlying periodic lattice. This generates a complex energy landscape with…
Understanding how multi-component liquid mixtures undergo phase separation is central to elucidating biophysical organization in the cell. Here, combining analytical and numerical results, we characterise the dynamics of mixtures with…