Related papers: Nucleation in Systems with Elastic Forces
Viscoelastic phase separation of colloidal suspensions can be interrupted to form gels either by glass transition or by crystallization. With a new confocal microscopy protocol, we follow the entire kinetics of phase separation, from…
The dynamical arrest of gels is the consequence of a well defined structural phase transition, leading to the formation of a spanning cluster of bonded particles. The dynamical glass transition, instead, is not accompanied by any clear…
Inclusive $A(e,e')X$ and semi-inclusive $A(e,e'N)X$ deep inelastic electron scattering processes off few-nucleon systems are investigated at $x > 1$, showing some of the relevant features of the cross section which are sensitive to the…
Homogeneous nucleation of a new phase near a second, continuous, transition, is considered. The continuous transition is in the metastable region associated with the first-order phase transition, one of whose coexisting phases is…
We reconsider model II of [J. Chem. Phys. 1968, 49, 1778--1783], a two-dimensional lattice-gas system featuring a crystalline phase and two distinct fluid phases (liquid and vapor). In this system, a particle prevents other particles from…
The appearance of nuclear clusters in stellar matter at densities below nuclear saturation is an important feature in the modeling of the equation of state for astrophysical applications. There are different theoretical concepts to describe…
Using molecular dynamics simulations, we investigate the crystallization pathways of two exemplary systems that form the same complex crystal structure but differ fundamentally in the nature of their particle interactions. One system is…
Nucleation phenomena commonly observed in our every day life are of fundamental, technological and societal importance in many areas, but some of their most intimate mechanisms remain however to be unravelled. Crystal nucleation, the early…
Bistability, or the coexistence of two stable phases, can be broken by a bias field $h$ destabilising one of the phases via the nucleation and growth of defects. Strong long-range interactions, $1/r^\alpha$ with $\alpha$ less than the…
Classical nucleation theory (CNT), linking rare nucleation events to the free energy landscape of a growing nucleus, is central to understanding phase-change kinetics in passive fluids. Nucleation in non-equilibrium systems is much harder…
A recent study has demonstrated that phase separation in binary liquid mixtures is arrested in the presence of elastic networks and can lead to a nearly uniformly-sized distribution of the dilute-phase droplets. At longer timescales, these…
Liquids in systems with spherically symmetric interactions are not thermodynamically stable when the range of the attraction is reduced sufficiently. However, these metastable liquids have lifetimes long enough that they are readily…
A two-dimensional system of soft particles interacting via a two-length-scale potential is studied. Density functional theory and Brownian dynamics simulations reveal a fluid phase and two crystalline phases with different lattice spacing.…
The nucleation of a droplet of stable cylinder phase from a metastable lamellar phase is examined within the single-mode approximation to the Brazovskii model for diblock copolymer melts. By employing a variational ansatz for the droplet…
The most interesting step of condensation is the cluster formation up to the critical size. In a closed system, this is an instationary process, as the vapour is depleted by the emerging liquid phase. This imposes a limitation on direct…
Crystal nucleation studies using hard-sphere and Lennard-Jones models have shown that the pressure within the nucleus is lower than that in the surrounding liquid. Here, we use the mechanical route to obtain it for an ice nucleus in…
The onset of frictional sliding between contacting bodies under shear load is nucleated by the quasi-static growth of localized slip patches. After reaching a certain critical size, these patches become unstable and continue growing…
Liquid crystals in two dimensions undergo a first-order isotropic-to-quasi-nematic transition, provided the particle interactions are sufficiently ``sharp and narrow''. This implies phase coexistence between isotropic and quasi-nematic…
The role of saturation for cluster formation in finite systems such as atomic nuclei is analyzed by considering three length-scale ratios, and performing deformation-constrained self-consistent mean-field calculations. The effect of…
Experiments reveal that structural transitions in thin sheets are mediated by the passage of transient and stable mobile localized elastic excitations. These ``crumples'' or ``d-cones'' nucleate, propagate, interact, annihilate, and escape.…