Related papers: Ordering and Melting in Colloidal Molecular Crysta…
In atomic nuclei, as in other many-body systems, the classical phase space is mixed, so ordered and chaotic states generally coexist. In this contribution we discuss some models, showing the transition from order to chaos. In several cases…
We study the phase behavior of bowl-shaped particles using computer simulations. These particles were found experimentally to form a meta-stable worm-like fluid phase in which the bowl-shaped particles have a strong tendency to stack on top…
We present a confocal-microscopy study of demixing and remixing in binary liquids containing colloidal particles. First, particle-stabilized emulsions have been fabricated by nucleation and growth of droplets upon cooling from the…
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…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
To enlighten the nature of the order-disorder and order-order transitions in block copolymer melts confined in narrow capillaries we analyze peculiarities of the conventional Landau weak crystallization theory of systems confined to…
The nucleation of crystals from the liquid melt is often characterized by a competition between different crystalline structures or polymorphs, and can result in nuclei with heterogeneous compositions. These mixed-phase nuclei can display…
By path integral Monte Carlo simulations we study the phase diagram of two - dimensional mesoscopic clusters formed by electrons in a semiconductor quantum dot or by indirect magnetoexcitons in double quantum dots. At zero (or sufficiently…
Usually, we expect large particles to sediment faster than small of the same material. Contrary to this intuition, we report a dynamical competition between sedimentation and phase ordering which leads to smaller particles settling faster…
We introduce a computational method to discover polymorphs in molecular crystals at finite temperature. The method is based on reproducing the crystallization process starting from the liquid and letting the system discover the relevant…
We study the melting behavior of charged colloidal crystals, using a simulation technique that combines a continuous mean-field Poisson-Boltzmann description for the microscopic electrolyte ions with a Brownian-dynamics simulation for the…
We highlight interesting thermomagnetic history effects across the transition line between the (quasi) ordered and disordered vortex states in single crystal YBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_{7-\delta}$, and argue that these features are indicative of the…
One of the central experimental efforts in nematic colloids research aims to explore how the interplay between the geometry of particles along with the accompanying nematic director deformations and defects around them can provide a means…
Particle tracking is a key to single-particle-level confocal microscopy observation of colloidal suspensions, emulsions, and granular matter. The conventional tracking method has not been able to provide accurate information on the size of…
Monte Carlo simulations have been performed for aqueous charged colloidal suspensions as a function of charge density on the particles and salt concentration. We vary the charge density in our simulations over a range where a reentrant…
In the Mott insulating phase of the transition metal oxides, the effective orbital-orbital interaction is directional both in the orbital space and in the real space. We discuss a classical realization of directional coupling in two…
We theoretically study mixtures of chemically-interacting particles, which produce or consume a chemical to which they are attracted or repelled, in the most general case of many coexisting species. We find a new class of active phase…
We study the influence of quenched disorder on the two-dimensional melting behavior by using both video-microscopy of superparamagnetic colloidal particles and computer simulations of repulsive parallel dipoles. Quenched disorder is…
A flux liquid can condense into a smectic crystal in a pure layered superconductors with the magnetic field oriented nearly parallel to the layers. If the smectic order is commensurate with the layering, this crystal is {\sl stable} to…
Motivated by the idea of using simple macroscopic examples to illustrate the physics of complex systems, we modify a historic experimental setup in which interacting floating magnets spontaneously self-assemble into ordered clusters. By…