Related papers: Melting of Hard Cubes
By path integral Monte Carlo simulations we study the phase diagram of two - dimensional mesoscopic clusters formed by electrons in a semiconductor quantum dot or by indirect magnetoexcitons in double quantum dots. At zero (or sufficiently…
Freezing of charged colloids on square or triangular two-dimensional periodic substrates has been recently shown to realize a rich variety of orientational orders. We propose a theoretical framework to analyze the corresponding structures.…
Nucleation is an activated process in which the system has to overcome a free energy barrier in order for a first-order phase transition between the metastable and the stable phases to take place. In the liquid-to-solid transition the…
The premelting of ice is well known, but little is known about how the premelted and solid surfaces convert to each other. In this work, the transition dynamics between two phases are revealed with large-scale molecular dynamics…
The origin of predicted and observed anomalies in caloric curves of nuclei and other mesoscopic systems is investigated. It is shown that a straightforward thermodynamical treatment of an evaporating liquid drop leads to a backbending in…
The nature of the metal-insulator Mott transition at zero temperature has been discussed for a number of years. Whether it occurs through a quantum critical point or through a first order transition is expected to profoundly influence the…
Ice discs were released at the surface of a thermalized aluminium plate. The fusion of the ice creates a lubrication film between the ice disc and the plate. The disc becomes very mobile. The situation is isomorphe to the Leidenfrost effect…
Glassy matter like crystals resists change in shape. Therefore a theory for their continuous melting should show how the shear elastic constant $\mu$ goes to zero. Since viscosity is the long wave-length low frequency limit of shear…
Positional ordering of a two-dimensional fluid of hard disks is examined in such narrow tubes where only the nearest-neighbor interactions take place. Using the exact transfer-matrix method the transverse and longitudinal pressure…
A model describing the three-dimensional folding of the triangular lattice on the face-centered cubic lattice is generalized allowing the presence of defects corresponding to cuts in the two-dimensional network. The model can be expressed…
We investigate the ordered morphologies occurring in thin-films diblock copolymer. For temperatures above the order-disorder transition and for an arbitrary two-dimensional surface pattern, we use a Ginzburg-Landau expansion of the free…
We consider a heavy quark-antiquark $(q\bar{q})$ pair as a heavy meson in the medium composed of light quarks and gluons. By using the AdS/CFT correspondence, the properties of this system are investigated. In particular, we study the…
Despite its fundamental and technological importance, a microscopic understanding of the crystallization process is still elusive. By computer simulations of the hard-sphere model we reveal the mechanism by which thermal fluctuations drive…
We present an extensive but concise review of our present understanding, largely based on theory and simulation work from our group, on the equilibrium behavior of solid surfaces and nanosystems close to the bulk melting point. In the first…
We study the classical version of the 120-degree model. This is an attractive nearest-neighbor system in three dimensions with XY (rotor) spins and interaction such that only a particular projection of the spins gets coupled in each…
We test the validity of some widely used phenomenological criteria for the localization of the fluid-solid transition thresholds against the phase diagrams of particles interacting through the exp-6, inverse-power-law, and Gaussian…
Melting in 2D is described by the celebrated Kosterlitz-Thouless-Halperin-Nelson-Young (KTHNY) theory. The unbinding of two different types of topological defects destroys translational and orientational order at different temperatures. The…
Injecting a sufficiently large energy density into an isolated many-particle system prepared in a state with long-range order will lead to the melting of the order over time. Detailed information about this process can be derived from the…
We generalize the earlier theory by Fredrickson [J. Rheol. v.38, 1045 (1994)] to study the orientational behaviour of the hexagonal phase of diblock copolymer melt subjected to steady shear flow. We use symmetry arguments to show that the…
We discuss the microscopic mechanisms by which low-temperature amorphous states, such as ultrastable glasses, transform into equilibrium fluids, after a sudden temperature increase. Experiments suggest that this process is similar to the…