Related papers: Fractionated crystallisation in a polydisperse mix…
Hard spheres with a polydispersity above approximately 8% are shown to crystallise into two phase-separated solid phases. A polydispersity above 8% is too large to be tolerated by a single solid phase but phase separation produces two…
The effect of polydispersity on the freezing transition of hard spheres is examined within a moment description. At low polydispersities a single fluid-to-crystal transition is recovered. With increasing polydispersity we find a density…
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…
Polydisperse mixtures are those in which components with a whole range of sizes are present. It is shown that the fluid phase of polydisperse hard spheres is thermodynamically unstable unless the density of large spheres decreases at least…
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)…
Unlike atoms, colloidal particles are not identical, but can only be synthesised within a finite size tolerance. Colloids are therefore polydisperse, i.e. mixtures of infinitely many components with sizes drawn from a continuous…
We report a molecular dynamics study of crystallization in highly asymmetric binary hard-sphere mixtures, in which the large spheres can form a crystal phase while the small ones remain disordered during the crystallization process of the…
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,…
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 use specialized Monte Carlo simulation methods and moment free energy calculations to provide conclusive evidence that dense polydisperse spheres at equilibrium demix into coexisting fcc phases, with more phases appearing as the spread…
The solid-solid coexistence of a polydisperse hard sphere system is studied by using the Monte Carlo simulation. The results show that for large enough polydispersity the solid-solid coexistence state is more stable than the single-phase…
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…
We study the phase behavior of hard spheres confined between two parallel hard plates using extensive computer simulations. We determine the full equilibrium phase diagram for arbitrary densities and plate separations from one to five…
We study the interplay between the fluid-crystal transition and the glass transition of elastic sphere system with polydispersity using nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. It is found that the end point of the crystal-fluid…
The statistical mechanics of phase transitions in dense systems of polydisperse particles presents distinctive challenges to computer simulation and analytical theory alike. The core difficulty, namely dealing correctly with particle size…
We study numerically the crystallization of a hard-sphere mixture with 8\% polydispersity. Although often used as a model glass former, for small system sizes we observe crystallization in molecular dynamics simulations. This opens the…
Hard spheres with an attraction of range a tenth to a hundredth of the sphere diameter are constrained to remain fluid even at densities when monodisperse particles at equilibrium would have crystallised, in order to compare with…
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…
The width of the distribution of species in a polydisperse system is employed in a small-variable expansion, to obtain a well-controlled and compact scheme by which to calculate phase equilibria in multi-phase systems. General and universal…
Specialized Monte Carlo simulation techniques and moment free energy method calculations, capable of treating fractionation exactly, are deployed to study the crystalline phase behaviour of an assembly of spherical particles described by a…