Related papers: Changing shapes in the nanoworld
The dynamics of the discrete Gaussian model for the surface of a crystal deposited on a disordered substrate is investigated by Monte Carlo simulations. The mobility of the growing surface was studied as a function of a small driving force…
Soft materials with layered structure such as membranes, block copolymers, and smectics exhibit intriguing morphologies with nontrivial curvatures. We report on restructuring the Gaussian and mean curvatures of smectic A films with free…
Crystal nucleation and growth processes induced by an externally applied shear strain in a model metallic glass are studied by means of nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations, in a range of temperatures. We observe that the…
We study the spontaneous nucleation and growth of sodium chloride crystals induced by controlled evaporation in confined geometries (microcapillaries) spanning several orders of magnitude in volume. In all experiments, the nucleation…
A three fluid system describing the decay of the curvaton is studied by numerical and analytical means. We place constraints on the allowed interaction strengths between the fluids and initial curvaton density by requiring that the curvaton…
The discrete Gaussian model for the surface of a crystal deposited on a disordered substrate is studied by Monte Carlo simulations. A continuous transition is found from a phase with a thermally-induced roughness to a glassy one in which…
Confinement can have a dramatic effect on the behavior of all sorts of particulate systems and it therefore is an important phenomenon in many different areas of physics and technology. Here, we investigate the role played by the softness…
Quantum crystals abound in the whole range of solid-state species. Below a certain threshold temperature the physical behavior of rare gases (4He and Ne), molecular solids (H2 and CH4), and some ionic (LiH), covalent (graphite), and…
The melting of metallic nanoparticles is governed by surface pre-melting, a phenomenon traditionally modeled as the isotropic growth of a uniform liquid shell. Challenging this classical view, we report facet-dependent surface pre-melting…
Deposits of dipolar particles are investigated by means of extensive Monte Carlo simulations. We found that the effect of the interactions is described by an initial, non-universal, scaling regime characterized by orientationally ordered…
Studies of nucleation generally focus on the properties of the critical cluster, but the presence of defects within the crystal lattice means that the population of nuclei necessarily evolve through a distribution of pre-critical clusters…
We present a quantitative theory for a relaxation function in a simple glass-forming model (binary mixture of particles with different interaction parameters). It is shown that the slowing down is caused by the competition between locally…
Trajectories of a polarizable species (atoms or molecules) in the vicinity of a negatively charged nanoparticle (at a floating potential) are considered. The atoms are pulled into regions of strong electric field by polarization forces. The…
The process of homogeneous crystal nucleation has been considered in a model liquid, where the interparticle interaction is described by a short-range spherical oscillatory potential. Mechanisms of initiating structural ordering in the…
Understanding the pathways to crystallization during the deposition of a vapor phase on a cold solid substrate is of great interest in industry, e.g., for the realization of electronic devices made of crystallites-free glassy materials, as…
We consider the problem of relaxation in a one-dimensional system of interacting electrons. In the limit of weak interactions, we calculate the decay rate of a single-electron excitation, accounting for the nonlinear dispersion. The leading…
We present the results of Monte Carlo simulations of the magnetic properties of a model for a single nanoparticle consisting in a ferromagnetic core surrounded by an antiferromagnetic shell. The simulations of hysteresis loops after cooling…
Molecular dynamic (MD) simulations are applied to investigate the dependency of the kinetic friction coefficient on the temperature at the nano-scale. The system is comprised of an aluminum spherical particle consisting of 32000 atoms in an…
Fluctuations of isolated and pairs of ascending steps of monoatomic height are studied in the framework of SOS models, using mainly Monte Carlo techniques. Below the roughening transistion of the surface, the profiles of long steps show the…
The phenomenon of salt creeping along a free surface remains only partially understood, particularly with respect to its dynamics. In this work, combining a theoretical model with controlled experiments, we identify three distinct kinetic…