Related papers: Fluctuations in Chemical Gelation
Using computer simulations, we identify the mechanisms causing aggregation and structural arrest of colloidal suspensions interacting with a short-ranged attraction at moderate and high densities. Two different non-ergodicity transitions…
We report a molecular dynamics simulation of a supercooled simple monatomic glass-forming liquid. It is found that the onset of the supercooled regime results in formation of distinct domains of slow diffusion which are confined to the…
Despite its fundamental and technological importance, a microscopic understanding of the crystallization process is still elusive. By computer simulations of the hard-sphere model we reveal the mechanism by which thermal fluctuations drive…
The physical properties of blends of distinct homopolymers, cross-linked beyond the gelation point, are addressed via a Landau approach involving a pair of coupled order-parameter fields: one describing vulcanisation, the other describing…
We numerically examine the effect of thermal fluctuations on a first-order phase transition in 2+1 dimensions. By focusing on the expansion of a single bubble we are able to calculate changes in the bubble wall's velocity as well as changes…
Dynamical heterogeneities -- strong fluctuations near the glass transition -- are believed to be crucial to explain much of the glass transition phenomenology. One possible hypothesis for their origin is that they emerge from soft…
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…
Colloidal gels are out of equilibrium soft solids composed of attractive Brownian particles that form a space-spanning network at low volume fractions. The elastic properties of these systems result from the network microstructure, which is…
Fluctuations of energy and heat are investigated during the relaxation following the instantaneous temperature quench of an extended system. Results are obtained analytically for the Gaussian model and for the large $N$ model quenched below…
Typically, in quiescent conditions, attractive colloids at low volume fractions form fractal gels structured into two length scales: the colloidal and the fractal cluster scales. However when flow interfere with gelation colloidal fractal…
We investigated the viscoelastic properties of colloid-polymer mixtures at intermediate colloid volume fraction and varying polymer concentrations, thereby tuning the attractive interactions. Within the examined range of polymer…
Thermal stability properties and the melting-like transition of Na_n, n=13-147, clusters are studied through microcanonical molecular dynamics simulations. The metallic bonding in the sodium clusters is mimicked by a many-body Gupta…
We describe a new phenomenon in models of coalescence and fragmentation, that of gel-shatter cycles. These are dynamical, unforced, stochastic cycles in which slow, approximately deterministic coalescence up to and beyond gelation is…
Jamming is a geometric phase transition occurring in dense particle systems in the absence of temperature. We use computer simulations to analyse the effect of thermal fluctuations on several signatures of the transition. We show that…
Fluctuations are a key property of both classical and quantum systems. While the fluctuations are well understood for many quantum systems at zero temperature, the case of an interacting quantum system at finite temperature still poses…
We introduce a microscopically realistic model of a physical gel and use computer simulations to study its static and dynamic properties at thermal equilibrium. The phase diagram comprises a sol phase, a coexistence region ending at a…
We investigate a phase separation instability that occurs in a system of nearly elastically colliding hard spheres driven by a thermal wall. If the aspect ratio of the confining box exceeds a threshold value, granular hydrostatics predict…
Using computer simulations of an atomistic glass-forming liquid, we investigate the fluctuations of the overlap between a fluid configuration and a quenched reference system. We find that large fluctuations of the overlap develop as…
We study the thermodynamic curvature, $R$, around the chiral phase transition at finite temperature and chemical potential, within the quark-meson model augmented with meson fluctuations. We study the effect of the fluctuations, pions and…
We report on quantitative comparisons between simulation results of a bead-spring model and mode-coupling theory calculations for the structural and conformational dynamics of a supercooled, unentangled polymer melt. We find…