Related papers: Solid-liquid phase coexistence and structural tran…
Micrometre sized colloidal particles can be viewed as large atoms with tailorable size, shape and interactions. These building blocks can assemble into extremely rich structures and phases, in which the thermal motions of particles can be…
Molecular dynamics simulations show that gold clusters with about 600--3000 atoms crystallize into a Mackay icosahedron upon cooling from the liquid. A detailed surface analysis shows that the facets on the surface of the Mackay icosahedral…
Concentrated colloidal suspensions are a well-tested model system which has a glass transition. Colloids are suspensions of small solid particles in a liquid, and exhibit glassy behavior when the particle concentration is high; the…
We investigate quasicrystal-forming soft matter using a two-scale phase field crystal model. At state points near thermodynamic coexistence between bulk quasicrystals and the liquid phase, we find multiple metastable spatially localized…
We study the phase behavior of hard spheres confined between two parallel hard plates using extensive computer simulations. We determine the full equilibrium phase diagram for arbitrary densities and plate separations from one to five…
The melting of 2D dust clusters caused by one additional particle in the lower layer has experimentally been observed to undergo a two-step transition, which divides the phase of the cluster into three stages. The first transition is a jump…
Using molecular dynamics simulation technique, we have studied the melting behaviours of free, icosahedral PtN clusters in the size range of N=12-14. Voter and Chen version of an embedded-atom model, derived by fitting to experimental data…
Multicanonical ensemble sampling simulations have been performed to calculate the phase diagram of a Lennard-Jones fluid embedded in a fractal random matrix generated through diffusion limited cluster aggregation. The study of the system at…
The solid-solid coexistence of a polydisperse hard sphere system is studied by using the Monte Carlo simulation. The results show that for large enough polydispersity the solid-solid coexistence state is more stable than the single-phase…
Finite systems in confining potentials are known to undergo structural transitions similar to phase transitions. However, these systems are inhomogeneous, and their "melting" point may depend on the position in the trap and vary with the…
Most studies on melting under confinement focus only on the solid and liquid melt phases. Despite of its ubiquity, contributions from the capillary interface (liquid / vapor interface) are often neglected. In this study the melting behavior…
Investigating thermodynamic properties of liquid-solid transitions of flexible homopolymers with elastic bonds by means of multicanonical Monte Carlo simulations, we find crystalline conformations that resemble ground-state structures of…
Using molecular dynamics simulations, with a realistic many-body embedded-atom potential, and a novel method to characterize local order, we study the structure of pure nickel during the rapid quench of the liquid and in the resulting…
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…
The freezing of metal nanoclusters such as gold, silver, and copper exhibits a novel structural evolution. The formation of the icosahedral (Ih) structure is dominant despite its energetic metastability. This important phenomenon, hitherto…
The statistical mechanics of phase transitions in dense systems of polydisperse particles presents distinctive challenges to computer simulation and analytical theory alike. The core difficulty, namely dealing correctly with particle size…
When a system undergoes a transition from a liquid to a solid phase, it passes through multiple intermediate structures before reaching the final state. However, our knowledge on the exact pathways of this process is limited, mainly due to…
A series of electronic and structural transitions are predicted in molten lithium from first principles. A new phase with tetrahedral local order characteristic of $sp^3$ bonded materials and poor electrical conductivity is found at…
As one increases the concentration of a colloidal suspension, the system exhibits a dramatic increase in viscosity. Structurally, the system resembles a liquid, yet motions within the suspension are slow enough that it can be considered…
The melting-like transition in sodium clusters Na_N, with N=55, 92, and 142 is studied by using constant-energy molecular dynamics simulations. An orbital-free version of the Car-Parrinello technique is used which scales linearly with…