Related papers: Can liquid metal surfaces have hexatic order?
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…
Recent advances in cold atom experimentation suggest that studies of quantum two-dimensional melting of dipolar molecules, with dipoles aligned perpendicular to ordering plane, may be on the horizon. An intriguing aspect of this problem is…
The flux line lattice melting transition in two-dimensional pure and disordered superconductors is studied by a Monte Carlo simulation using the lowest Landau level approximation and quasi-periodic boundary condition on a plane. The…
A cascade of phase transitions from square to hexagonal lattice is studied in 2D system of particles interacting via core-softened potential. Due to the presence of two length-scales of repulsion, different local configurations with four,…
A flux liquid can condense into a smectic crystal in a pure layered superconductor with the magnetic field oriented nearly parallel to the layers. Similar order can arise in low temperature $^4$He films with a highly anisotropic periodic…
Supercooled liquid is described in terms of the theory of defected states of bond orientational order using the continuous theory of defects. It is shown that the initiation of a local orientation order leads to the breakdown of the initial…
We demonstrate that the phase transition from columnar-hexagonal liquid crystal to hexagonal-crystalline solid falls into an unusual universality class, which in three-dimensional allows for both discontinuous transitions as well as…
We investigate the early part of the crystal nucleation process in the hard sphere fluid using data produced by computer simulation. We find that hexagonal order manifests continuously in the overcompressed liquid, beginning approximately…
A two dimensional crystalline layer is found at the surface of the liquid eutectic Au$_{82}$Si$_{18}$ alloy above its melting point $T_M=359 ^{\circ}$C. Underlying this crystalline layer we find a layered structure, 6-7 atomic layers thick.…
We report the structure of transient fluctuations in the liquid phase of a two-dimensional system that exhibits several ordered phases with different symmetries. The density-temperature phase diagram of the system studied, composed of…
Systems of hard shapes crystallize due to entropy. How is entropy distributed among translational and rotational microscopic contributions? We answer this question by decomposing thermal fluctuation of crystals of hard hexagons into…
We examine the ordering behavior of hard plate-like particle in a very narrow slit-like pore using the Parsons-Lee density functional theory and the restricted orientation approximation. We observe that the plates are orientationally…
We provide a quantitative analysis of all kinds of topological defects present in 2D passive and active repulsive disk systems. We show that the passage from the solid to the hexatic is driven by the unbinding of dislocations. Instead,…
We report large-scale computer simulations of the hard-disk system at high densities in the region of the melting transition. Our simulations reproduce the equation of state, previously obtained using the event-chain Monte Carlo algorithm,…
We report Monte Carlo results for the two-dimensional hard disk system in the transition region. Simulations were performed in the NVT ensemble with up to 1024^2 disks. The scaling behaviour of the positional and bond-orientational order…
X-ray reflectivity measurements on the free surface of liquid Sn are presented. They exhibit the high-angle peak, indicative of surface-induced layering, also found for other pure liquid metals (Hg, Ga and In). However, a low-angle peak,…
We show that order-parameter fluctuations in a good type-I superconductor or a liquid crystal always increase the size of the first-order transition. This behavior is eventually changed when the system crosses over to inverted-XY critical…
We have studied, using molecular dynamics simulations, the pressure-induced melting in a monolayer of soft repulsive spherocylinders whose centers of mass are constrained to move on the surface of a sphere. We show that the orientational…
We study orientational order, subject to thermal fluctuations, on a fixed curved surface. We derive, in particular, the average density of zeros of Gaussian distributed vector fields on a closed Riemannian manifold. Results are compared…
We show that two-dimensional systems of deformable particles undergo a continuous liquid-hexatic transition upon compression or cooling, but no hexatic-solid transition-even at zero temperature and high density. Numerical simulations reveal…