Related papers: Ordering and Melting in Colloidal Molecular Crysta…

The kinetic mechanisms underlying bottom-up assembly of colloidal particles have been widely investigated in efforts to control crystallization pathways and to direct growth into targeted superstructures for applications including photonic…

Phase separation of sequence-disordered liquid crystalline polymers, a promising class of technological and biological relevance, is studied by field theory, and thermodynamic mechanisms responsible for orientational ordering observed in…

A mesoscopic system of a few particles exhibits behaviors that strongly differ from those of a macroscopic system. While in a macroscopic system phase transitions are universal, a change in the state of a mesoscopic system depends on its…

Experiments on spherical particles in a 3D Couette cell vibrated from below and sheared from above show a hysteretic freezing/melting transition. Under sufficient vibration a crystallized state is observed, which can be melted by sufficient…

Two dimensional (2D) classical system of dipole particles confined by a quadratic potential is studied. For clusters of N < 81 particles ground state configurations and appropriate eigenfrequencies and eigenvectors for the normal modes are…

We find an order-disorder transition from crystals to disordered crystals for static packings of frictionless spheres. While the geometric indicators are mostly blind to the transition, disordered crystals already exhibit properties apart…

The competition between thermal fluctuations and potential forces is the foundation of our understanding of phase transitions and matter in equilibrium. Driving matter out of equilibrium allows for a new class of interactions which are…

Colloidal systems offer the ideal conditions to study the nucleation process, both from an experimental viewpoint, due to their relative large size and long time-scales, and from a modeling point of view, due to the tunability of their…

Crystallization represents the prime example of a disorder order transition. In realistic situations, however, container walls and impurities are frequently present and hence crystallization is heterogeneously seeded. Rarely the seeds are…

Colloidal particles dispersed in liquid crystals can form new materials with tunable elastic and electro-optic properties. In a periodic `blue phase' host, particles should template into colloidal crystals with potential uses in photonics,…

In superionic compounds one component pre-melts providing high ionic conductivity to solid state electrolytes. Here, we find sublattice melting in colloidal crystals of oppositely charged particles that are highly asymmetric in size and…

In many condensed matter systems, long range order emerges at low temperatures as thermal fluctuations subside. In the presence of competing interactions or quenched disorder, however, some systems can show unusual configurations that…

We show that colloidal molecular crystal states interacting with a periodic substrate, such as an optical trap array, and a rotating external field can undergo a rapid pattern switching in which the orientation of the crystal changes. In…

Motivated by recent experimental findings, we investigate the possible occurrence and characteristics of quasicrystalline order in two-dimensional mixtures of point dipoles with two sorts of dipole moments. Despite the fact that the dipolar…

Disorder induced melting, where the increase in positional entropy created by random pinning sites drives the order-disorder transition in a periodic solid, provides an alternate route to the more conventional thermal melting. Here, using…

All liquids (except helium due to quantum effects) crystallize at low temperatures, forming ordered structures. The competition between disorder, which stabilizes the liquid phase, and energy, which favors the ordered crystalline structure,…

A recently introduced active phase field crystal model describes the formation of ordered resting and traveling crystals in systems of self-propelled particles. Increasing the active drive, a resting crystal can be forced to perform…

We investigate the melting behavior of two-dimensional colloidal crystals stabilized by a core-softened potential featuring two competing interaction length scales. Using molecular dynamics simulations, we analyze three polymorphic solid…

We investigate two-dimensional (2d) melting in the presence of a one-dimensional (1d) periodic potential as, for example, realized in recent experiments on 2d colloids subjected to two interfering laser beams. The topology of the phase…

The melting of the corner of a crystal is a classical, real-world, non-equilibrium statistical mechanics problem which has shown several connections with other branches of physics and mathematics. For a perfect, classical crystal in two and…