Related papers: Non-Conventional Structural Phase Transitions and …
A mixture of hard squares, dimers and vacancies on a square lattice is known to undergo a transition from a low-density disordered phase to high-density columnar ordered phase. Along the fully packed square-dimer line, the system undergoes…
We discuss recent developments and present new findings in the colloidal description of soft polymeric macromolecular aggregates. For various macromolecular architectures, such as linear chains, star polymers, dendrimers and polyelectrolyte…
Nitrogen represents an archetypal example of material exhibiting a pressure driven transformation from molecular to polymeric state. Detailed investigations of such transformations are challenging because of a large kinetic barrier between…
We conducted replica exchange Monte Carlo simulations to investigate the phase diagram of identical hard rhombi systems in two dimensions. The rhombi shape varies from nearly square-like, as their minor angle a approaches 90 degrees, to…
Crystalline symmetries can generate exotic band-crossing features, which can lead to unconventional fermionic excitations with interesting physical properties. We show how a cubic Dirac point---a four-fold-degenerate band-crossing point…
The phase behavior of hard superballs is examined using molecular dynamics within a deformable periodic simulation box. A superball's interior is defined by the inequality $|x|^{2q} + |y|^{2q} + |z|^{2q} \leq 1$, which provides a versatile…
"Fluid polyamorphism" is the existence of different condensed amorphous states in a single-component fluid. It is either found or predicted, usually at extreme conditions, for a broad group of very different substances, including helium,…
MAX phases are a family of layered, hexagonal-structure ternary carbides or nitrides of a transitional metal and an A-group element. What makes this type of material fascinating and potentially useful is their remarkable combinations of…
If particles interact according to isotropic pair potentials that favor multiple length scales, in principle a large variety of different complex structures can be achieved by self-assembly. We present, motivate, and discuss a conjecture…
Topological insulators and topological superconductors are distinguished by their bulk phase transitions and gapless states at a sharp boundary with the vacuum. Quasicrystals have recently been found to be topologically nontrivial. In…
Within the four-loop $\ve$ expansion, we study the critical behavior of certain antiferromagnets with complicated ordering. We show that an anisotropic stable fixed point governs the phase transitions with new critical exponents. This is…
Despite the fundamental importance of solid--solid transitions for metallurgy, ceramics, earth science, reconfigurable materials, and colloidal matter, the details of how materials transform between two solid structures are poorly…
Colloidal crystals are used to understand fundamentals of atomic rearrangements in condensed matter and build complex metamaterials with unique functionalities. Simulations predict a multitude of self-assembled crystal structures from…
Using scaled-particle theory for binary mixtures of two-dimensional hard particles with rotational freedom, we analyse the stability of nematic phases and the demixing phase behaviour of a variety of mixtures, focussing on cases where at…
We study morphologies of thin-film diblock copolymers between two flat and parallel walls. The study is restricted to the weak segregation regime below the order-disorder transition temperature. The deviation from perfect lamellar shape is…
Noncollinear magnetic order is typically characterized by a "tetrad" ground state manifold (GSM) of three perpendicular vectors or nematic-directors. We study three types of tetrad orders in two spatial dimensions, whose GSMs are SO(3) =…
We use molecular simulation to construct equilibrium phase diagrams for two recently introduced model materials with isotropic, soft-repulsive pair interactions designed to favor diamond and simple cubic lattice ground states, respectively,…
We report on the discovery of a quantum tri-critical point (QTP) separating a line of first-order topological quantum phase transitions from a continuous transition regime in a strongly correlated one-dimensional lattice system.…
Using self-consistent field and density-functional theories, we first investigate colloidal self-assembling of colloid/polymer films confined between two soft surfaces grafted by polymers. With the increase of colloidal concentrations, the…
Subcritical transition to turbulence, in which the laminar state is linearly stable yet finite-amplitude perturbations develop into turbulence, is ubiquitous but lacks a simple analytical framework. We demonstrate such a framework using a…