Related papers: Controlling Quantum Materials by Growth: Thermodyn…
At the few-atom-thick limit, transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) exhibit a host of attractive electronic optical, and structural properties. The possibility to pattern these properties has a great impact on applied and fundamental…
Motivated by recent experiments, the isotropic-nematic phase transition in chromonic liquid crystals is studied. As temperature decreases, nematic nuclei nucleate, grow, and coalesce, giving rise to tactoid microstructures in an isotropic…
Review of selected fundamental topics on the interaction between phase transformations, fracture, and other structural changes in inelastic materials is presented. It mostly focuses on the concepts developed in the author's group over last…
In colloid and nanoparticle chemistry, particle size, shape, crystallinity, surface morphology and composition are controlled by employing the mechanisms of burst nucleation, diffusional growth, aggregation, or their combinations. Here we…
Microcanonical statistics can be well applied to non-extensive systems like nuclei, atomic clusters and systems at phase transitions of first order with inhomogeneous configurations like phase separation. No thermodynamic limit has to be…
We analyze thermodynamic models for fluid systems in equilibrium based on a virial expansion of the internal energy in terms of the volume density. We prove that the models, formulated for finite-size systems with $N$ particles, are exactly…
Defect engineering of two-dimensional materials routinely produces local magnetic moments, yet itinerant half-metallic ferromagnetism remains elusive -- experiments frequently yield paramagnetic insulators. We resolve this paradox for…
The hallmark feature of polymorphic systems is their ability to assemble into many possible structures at the same thermodynamic state. Designer polymorphic materials can in principle be engineered via programmable self-assembly, but the…
The transition metal dichalcogenide $1T$-TiSe$_2$ is a quasi-two-dimensional layered material with a phase transition towards a commensurate charge density wave (CDW) at a critical temperature T$_{c}\approx 200$K. The relationship between…
First-principles studies of two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides have contributed considerably to the understanding of their dielectric, optical, elastic, and vibrational properties. The majority of works to date focus on a…
The morphologies of two-dimensional (2D) crystals, nucleated, grown, and integrated within 2D elastic fluids, for instance in giant vesicle membranes, are dictated by an interplay of mechanics, permeability, and thermal contraction.…
Controlling the morphology of two-dimensional (2D) transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) plays a key role in their applications. Although chemical vapor deposition can achieve wafer-scale growth of 2D TMDs, a comprehensive theoretical…
Strong electron-electron interaction can induce Mott insulating state, which is believed to host unusual correlated phenomena such as quantum spin liquid when quantum fluctuation dominates and unconventional superconductivity through…
We consider an isolated point defect embedded in a homogeneous crystalline solid. We show that, in the harmonic approximation, a periodic supercell approximation of the formation free energy as well as of the transition rate between two…
Species or population that proliferate faster than others become dominant in numbers. Catalysis allows catalytic sets within a molecular reaction network to dominate the non catalytic parts of the network by processing most of the available…
Solid-solid phase transitions in metals are traditionally driven by changes in density or external pressure. Here we show that, under strong electronic excitation, structural stability is governed by the interplay between electronic effects…
Surface nanobubbles are complex micro- and nanoscale fluid systems. While thermodynamics is believed to dominate nanobubble dynamics, the precise mechanism by which nanobubble evolution is driven by thermodynamics remains unclear. It is…
A combination of classical density-functional theory and thermodynamic perturbation theory is applied to a survey of finite-temperature trends in the relative stabilities of one-component crystals and quasicrystals interacting via effective…
The dramatic slowdown of dynamics in supercooled liquids approaching the glass transition remains one of the central unresolved problems in condensed matter physics. We review approaches that attribute this slowdown to growing thermodynamic…
As phenomena that necessarily emerge from the collective behavior of interacting particles, phase transitions continue to be difficult to predict using statistical thermodynamics. A recent proposal called the topological hypothesis suggests…