Related papers: Can liquid metal surfaces have hexatic order?
Advances in high-precision dielectric spectroscopy has enabled access to non-linear susceptibilities of polar molecular liquids. The observed non-monotonic behavior has been claimed to provide strong support for theories of dynamic arrest…
X-ray resonant scattering at the K-edge of transition metal oxides is shown to measure the orbital order parameter, supposed to accompany magnetic ordering in some cases. Virtual transitions to the 3d-orbitals are quadrupolar in general. In…
Due to the lack of long-range order, it remains challenging to characterize the structure of disordered solids and understand the nature of the glass transition. Here we propose a new structural order parameter by taking into account…
Nematic liquid crystal (LC) molecules adsorbed on two dimensional materials are aligned along the crystal directions of the hexagonal lattice. It was demonstrated that short electric pulses can reorient the aligned LC molecules in the…
We study the two-dimensional surface long-range order in a non-equilibrium steady state under shear flow using the three-dimensional conserved $O(N)$ model. Whereas the correlation on the surface is enhanced by increasing interactions…
With computer simulations of the hard sphere model, we examine in detail the microscopic pathway connecting the metastable melt to the emergence of crystalline clusters. In particular we will show that the nucleation of the solid phase does…
Nematic order often breaks the tetragonal symmetry of iron-based superconductors. It arises from regular structural transition or electronic instability in the normal phase. Here, we report the observation of a nematic superconducting…
Higher order parameters in the hard disk fluid are computed to investigate the number, the life time and size of transient crystal nuclei in the pre-freezing phase. The methodology introduces further neighbor shells bond orientational order…
High $T_c$ cuprate strange metals are noted for a DC-resistivity that scales linearly with $T$ from the onset of superconductivity to the crystal melting temperature, indicative of a Planckian dissipation life time $\tau_{\hbar}\simeq \hbar…
The sodium reordering in NaxCoO2 in the vicinity of room temperature is rationalized at high x in terms of phase transitions between square and striped phases. A striking hexagon-of-hexagons diffraction pattern observed for x=0.78 can be…
Smectic liquid crystals are charcterized by layers that have a preferred uniform spacing and vanishing curvature in their ground state. Dislocations in the smectics play an important role in phase nucleation, layer reorientation, and…
Phase separation of sequence-disordered liquid crystalline polymers, a promising class of technological and biological relevance, is studied by field theory, and thermodynamic mechanisms responsible for orientational ordering observed in…
We study elasticity of spontaneously orientationally-ordered amorphous solids, characterized by a vanishing transverse shear modulus, as realized for example by nematic elastomers and gels. We show that local heterogeneities and elastic…
Long-range ordering of magnetic dipoles in bulk materials gives rise to a broad range of magnetic structures, from simple collinear ferromagnets and antiferromagnets, to complex magnetic helicoidal textures stabilized by competing exchange…
We report surface shear rheological measurements on dense insoluble monolayers of micron sized colloidal spheres at the oil/water interface and of the protein $\beta$-lactoglobulin at the air/water surface. As expected, the elastic modulus…
The phase diagram of two-dimensional continuous particle systems is studied using Event-Chain Monte Carlo. For soft disks with repulsive power-law interactions $\propto r^{-n}$ with $n \gtrsim 6$, the recently established hard-disk melting…
Two-dimensional systems may admit a hexatic phase and hexatic-liquid transitions of different natures. The determination of their phase diagrams proved challenging, and indeed those of hard-disks, hard regular polygons, and inverse…
Recent studies of melting in hard disks have confirmed the existence of a hexatic phase occurring in a narrow window of density which is separated from the isotropic liquid phase by a first-order transition, and from the solid phase by a…
We introduce decorated piecewise hyperbolic and spherical surfaces and discuss their discrete conformal equivalence. A decoration is a choice of circle about each vertex of the surface. Our decorated surfaces are closely related to…
Using density-functional theory, we predict that the oxidation of the Ru(0001) surface proceeds via the accumulation of sub-surface oxygen in two-dimensional islands between the first and second substrate layer. This leads locally to a…