Related papers: Melting of a colloidal crystal
The nature of freezing and melting transitions for a system of model colloids interacting by a DLVO potential in a spatially periodic external potential is studied using extensive Monte Carlo simulations. Detailed finite size scaling…
We evaluate the free energy of the fluid and crystal phases for the ST2 potential [F.H. Stillinger and A. Rahman, J. Chem. Phys. 60, 1545 (1974)] with reaction field corrections for the long-range interactions. We estimate the phase…
The properties of the interface between solid and melt are key to solidification and melting, as the interfacial free energy introduces a kinetic barrier to phase transitions. This makes solidification happen below the melting temperature,…
One method for computationally determining phase boundaries is to explicitly simulate a direct coexistence between the two phases of interest. Although this approach works very well for fluid-fluid coexistences, it is often considered to be…
Monte Carlo simulations of crystal nuclei coexisting with the fluid phase in thermal equilibrium in finite volumes are presented and analyzed, for fluid densities from dense melts to the vapor. Generalizing the lever-rule for two-phase…
Extending to continuous potentials a cleaving wall molecular-dynamics simulation method recently developed for the hard-sphere system [Phys.Rev.Lett 85, 4751 (2000)], we calculate the crystal-melt interfacial free energies, $\gamma$, for a…
We present a method for the direct evaluation of the difference between the free energies of two crystalline structures, of different symmetry. The method rests on a Monte Carlo procedure which allows one to sample along a path, through…
Different computational techniques in combination with molecular dynamics computer simulation are used to to determine the wall-liquid and the wall-crystal interfacial free energies of a modified Lennard-Jones (LJ) system in contact with a…
In this review we focus on the determination of phase diagrams by computer simulation with particular attention to the fluid-solid and solid-solid equilibria. The calculation of the free energy of solid phases using the Einstein crystal and…
We have studied a model of a complex fluid consisting of particles interacting through a hard core and a short range attractive potential of both Yukawa and square-well form. Using a hybrid method, including a self-consistent and quite…
We propose a simple Monte Carlo method to calculate the interfacial free energy between the substrate and the material. Using this method we investigate the interfacial free energys of the hard sphere fluid and solid phases near a smooth…
We investigate the crystal structure of classical systems of spherical particles with an embedded point dipole at T=0. The ferroelectric ground state energy is calculated using generalizations of the Ewald summation technique. Due to the…
We use super-paramagnetic spherical particles which are arranged in a two-dimensional monolayer at a water/air interface to investigate the crystal to liquid phase transition. According to the KTHNY theory a crystal melts in thermal…
Freezing of simple liquid metals and the relative stabilities of competing crystalline solids are investigated using thermodynamic perturbation theory, the interactions between ions being modeled by effective pair potentials derived from…
The equilibrium phase diagram of a 1:1 symmetrical mixture composed of oppositely charged colloids is calculated using Monte Carlo simulations. We model the system by the DLVO effective interaction potential. The phase diagram is similar to…
As a model for a suspension of hard-sphere like colloidal particles where small nonadsorbing dissolved polymers create a depletion attraction, we introduce an effective colloid-colloid potential closely related to the Asakura-Oosawa model…
Pair potentials that are bounded at the origin provide an accurate description of the effective interaction for many systems of dissolved soft macromolecules (e.g., flexible dendrimers). Using numerical free-energy calculations, we…
We investigate two-dimensional (2d) melting in the presence of a one-dimensional (1d) periodic potential as, for example, realized in recent experiments on 2d colloids subjected to two interfering laser beams. The topology of the phase…
A microscopic picture of the ``preparation'' of a crystal to the transition to liquid state at the approach to melting temperature is proposed. Basing on simple crystallogeometric considerations and the analysis of the computational results…
The liquid and crystal phase of a single-component Fermi gas with dipolar interactions are investigated using quantum Monte Carlo methods in two spatial dimensions and at zero temperature. The dipoles are oriented by an external field…