Related papers: Universality in snowflake aggregation
Snowflakes play a crucial role in weather and climate. A significant portion of precipitation that reaches the surface originates as ice, even when it ultimately falls as rain. Contrary to the popular image of symmetric, dendritic crystals,…
A simple model of irreversible aggregation under differential sedimentation of particles in a fluid is presented. The structure of the aggregates produced by this process is found to feed back on the dynamics in such a way as to stabilise…
An extremely broad and important class of phenomena in nature involves the settling and aggregation of matter under gravitation in fluid systems. Some examples include: sedimenting marine snow particles in lakes and oceans (central to…
We describe a comprehensive model for the formation and morphological development of atmospheric ice crystals growing from water vapor, also known as snow crystals. Our model derives in part from empirical measurements of the intrinsic ice…
In irreversible aggregation processes droplets or polymers of microscopic size successively coalesce until a large cluster of macroscopic scale forms. This gelation transition is widely believed to be self-averaging, meaning that the order…
A simple three-dimensional model of a fluid whose constituent particles interact via a short range attractive and long range repulsive potential is used to model the aggregation into large spherical-like clusters made up of hundreds of…
Aggregation of ice particles is a fundamental process in the interstellar medium as well as in planet formation. Dedicated to study the contact physics of nm-ice particles we developed a thermal gradient force microscope. This allows us and…
Ice clouds, particularly cirrus clouds, significantly influence Earth's radiative balance but remain poorly characterized in current climate models. A major uncertainty arises from the variability of their microphysical properties,…
The effect of turbulence on snow precipitation is not incorporated into present weather forecasting models. Here we show evidence that turbulence is in fact a key influence on both fall speed and spatial distribution of settling snow. We…
Galaxies and clusters distributions show two major properties: (i) the positions of galaxies and clusters are characterized by a power law distribution indicating properties with respect to their positions. (ii) The distribution of masses…
Clustering is one of the mayor collective phenomena observed in active matter. We study the overdamped motion of interacting active Brownian particles in two dimensions. An instability in the pair correlation function causes the onset of…
Vertically pointing Doppler radar has been used to study the evolution of ice particles as they sediment through a cirrus cloud. The measured Doppler fall speeds, together with radar-derived estimates for the altitude of cloud top, are used…
This monograph reviews our current understanding of the physical dynamics of ice crystal growth, focusing on the spontaneous formation of complex structures from water vapor (called snow crystals) as a function of temperature,…
The mass and size distributions are the key characteristics of any astrophysical objects, including the densest clumps comprising the cold phase of multiphase environments. In our recent papers, we showed how individual clouds of various…
Convective self-aggregation is a modelling paradigm for thunderstorm organisation over a constant-temperature tropical sea surface. This setup can give rise to cloud clusters over timescales of weeks. In reality, sea surface temperatures do…
We investigate irreversible aggregation processes driven by a source of small mass clusters. In the spatially homogeneous situation, a well-mixed system is consists of clusters of various masses whose concentrations evolve according to an…
A new model that describes adsorption and clustering of particles on a surface is introduced. A {\it clustering} transition is found which separates between a phase of weakly correlated particle distributions and a phase of strongly…
We will show that the complex shapes of snow crystals can be explained from a simple basic mechanism that is also responsible for the appearance of many others structures in nature. We expect that this new physical mechanism, that follows…
We study clustering in a stochastic system of particles sliding down a fluctuating surface in one and two dimensions. In steady state, the density-density correlation function is a scaling function of separation and system size.This scaling…
The radar scattering properties of realistic aggregate snowflakes have been calculated using the Rayleigh-Gans theory. We find that the effect of the snowflake geometry on the scattering may be described in terms of a single universal…