Related papers: New mechanism for impurity-induced step bunching
The agglomeration of particles caused by the formation of capillary bridges has a decisive impact on the transport properties of a variety of at a first sight very different systems such as capillary suspensions, fluidized beds in chemical…
We study the appearance of bound states in the spin gap of spin-1/2 ladders induced by weak bond disorder. Starting from the strong-coupling limit, i.e., the limit of weakly coupled dimers, we perform a projection on the single-triplet…
We study impurity-induced particle growth and scrambling in clean one-dimensional free-fermion systems. We show that a single local impurity can act as a branching source: particle or operator weight propagates coherently into the free…
Burton-Cabrera-Frank (BCF) theory has proven to be a versatile framework to relate surface morphology and dynamics during crystal growth to the underlying mechanisms of adatom diffusion and attachment at steps. For an important class of…
We demonstrate a novel shear-induced mechanism for growth of concentration fluctuations in a bacterial suspension. Using a linear stability analysis, a homogeneously sheared suspension is shown to support exponentially growing layering…
Starting from a detailed model for the kinetics of a step edge or island boundary, we derive a Gibbs-Thomson type formula and the associated step stiffness as a function of the step edge orientation angle, $theta$. Basic ingredients of the…
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…
We consider patterns generated by adding large number of sand grains at a single site in an abelian sandpile model with a periodic initial configuration, and relaxing. The patterns show proportionate growth. We study the robustness of these…
We study a recently proposed nonlinear evolution equation describing the collective step meander on a vicinal surface subject to the Bales-Zangwill growth instability [O. Pierre-Louis et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. (80), 4221 (1998)]. A careful…
Ice accumulation hinders the performance of, and poses safety threats for infrastructure both on the ground and in the air. Previously, rationally designed superhydrophobic surfaces have demonstrated some potential as a passive means to…
The dynamics of small spherical neutrally buoyant particulate impurities immersed in a two-dimensional fluid flow are known to lead to particle accumulation in the regions of the flow in which rotation dominates over shear, provided that…
We explore a novel strategy of patterning nematic elastomers that does not require inscribing the texture directly. It is based on varying the dopant concentration that, beside shifting the phase transition point, affects the nematic…
We comprehend the role of imperfections in materials consisting of interacting particles, arising from different origins on their universal features. Specifically, we report the static and dynamic responses in a cluster of Coulomb…
The dynamic behavior of microtubules in solution can be strongly modified by interactions with walls or other structures. We examine here a microtubule growth model where the increase in size of the plus-end is perturbed by collisions with…
The intermittent transition between slow growth and rapid shrinkage in polymeric assemblies is termed dynamic instability, a feature observed in a variety of biochemically distinct assemblies including microtubules, actin and their…
We investigate the effect of impurities in multiferroic materials using an equation of motion approach for the spin dynamics of the host multiferroic compound. We model the impurities as a two-level system and focus on the regime where the…
The meander instability of a vicinal surface growing under step flow conditions is studied within a solid-on-solid model. In the absence of edge diffusion the selected meander wavelength agrees quantitatively with the continuum linear…
Many systems in nature and the synthetic world involve ordered arrangements of units on two-dimensional surfaces. We review here the fundamental role payed by both the topology of the underlying surface and its detailed curvature. Topology…
We study the transport properties of a Luttinger liquid in the presence of several time-dependent weak point-like impurities. Our starting point is the bosonized form of the Luttinger liquid Hamiltonian with a potential introduced by the…
Kinetic Monte Carlo simulation in conjunction with molecular dynamics simulation is utilized to study the effect of the steered deposition on the growth of Cu on Cu(1,1,17). It is found that the deposition flux becomes inhomogeneous in step…