Related papers: Phase behavior of hard spheres confined between pa…
Confinement can have a dramatic effect on the behavior of all sorts of particulate systems and it therefore is an important phenomenon in many different areas of physics and technology. Here, we investigate the role played by the softness…
In experimental systems, colloidal particles are virtually always at least somewhat polydisperse, which can have profound effects on their ability to crystallize. Unfortunately, accurately predicting the effects of polydispersity on phase…
We show that hard spheres confined between two parallel hard plates pack denser with periodic adaptive prismatic structures which are composed of alternating prisms of spheres. The internal structure of the prisms adapts to the slit height…
The equilibrium phase behaviour of hard spheres with size polydispersity is studied theoretically. We solve numerically the exact phase equilibrium equations that result from accurate free energy expressions for the fluid and solid phases,…
We report the observation of the homogenous nucleation of crystals in a dense layer of steel spheres confined between two horizontal plates vibrated vertically. Above a critical vibration amplitude, two-layer crystals with square symmetry…
We calculate the phase behavior of hard spheres with size polydispersity, using accurate free energy expressions for the fluid and solid phases. Cloud and shadow curves, which determine the onset of phase coexistence, are found exactly by…
The crystallization of hard spheres at equilibrium is perhaps the most familiar example of an entropically-driven phase transition. In recent years, it has become clear that activity can dramatically alter this order-disorder transition in…
We consider a system of spherical particles interacting by means of a pair potential equal to a finite constant for interparticle distances smaller than the sphere diameter and zero outside. The model may be a prototype for the interaction…
We study the phase behaviour of a two-dimensionally confined hard sphere colloidal system in the presence of a periodic light field of two interfering laser beams using Monte Carlo simulations. For a given packing fraction of the particles,…
We simulate a strongly size-disperse hard-sphere fluid confined between two parallel, hard walls. We find that confinement induces crystallization into n-layered hexagonal lattices and a novel honeycomb-shaped structure, facilitated by…
We consider the nature of the fluid-solid phase transition in a polydisperse mixture of hard spheres. For a sufficiently polydisperse mixture crystallisation occurs with simultaneous fractionation. At the fluid-solid boundary, a broad fluid…
The fluid - crystal equilibria of polydisperse mixtures of hard spheres have been studied by computer simulation of the solid phase and using an accurate equation of state for the fluid. A new scheme has been developed to evaluate the…
We investigate a behavior of a core-softened system in a thin slit pore (the width of the pore is equil to three diameters of the particles). In previous studies it was shown that strongly confined systems form crystalline phases which…
Phase transformations can be difficult to characterize at the microscopic level due to the inability to directly observe individual atomic motions. Model colloidal systems, by contrast, permit the direct observation of individual particle…
The kinetics of phase transition processes often governs the resulting material microstruc-ture. Using optical microscopy, we here investigate the formation and stabilization of a po-rous crystalline microstructure forming in low-salt…
Molecular dynamic simulations were employed to study a water-like model confined between hydrophobic and hydrophilic plates. The phase behavior of this system is obtained for different distances between the plates and particle-plate…
Purely entropic systems such as suspensions of hard rods, platelets and spheres show rich phase behavior. Rods and platelets have successfully been used as models to predict the equilibrium properties of liquid crystals for several decades.…
The phase diagram of colloidal hard superballs, of which the shape interpolates between cubes and octahedra via spheres, is determined by free-energy calculations in Monte Carlo simulations. We discover not only a stable face-centered cubic…
Microcanonical Monte Carlo simulations of a polydisperse soft-spheres model for liquids and colloids have been performed for very large polydispersity, in the region where a phase-separation is known to occur when the system (or part of it)…
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…