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Motivated by old experiments on colloidal suspensions, we report molecular dynamics simulations of assemblies of hard spheres, addressing crystallization and glass formation. The simulations cover wide ranges of polydispersity s (standard…

We investigate the early part of the crystal nucleation process in the hard sphere fluid using data produced by computer simulation. We find that hexagonal order manifests continuously in the overcompressed liquid, beginning approximately…

Recent theories of nucleation that go beyond Classical Nucleation Theory predict that diffusion-limited nucleation of both liquid droplets and of crystals from a low-density vapor (or weak solution) begins with long-wavelength density…

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…

Over the past two decades, a large number of studies addressed the topic of crystal nucleation in suspensions of hard spheres. The shared result of all these efforts is that, at low super-saturations, experimentally observed nucleation…

The discrepancy in nucleation rate densities between simulated and experimental hard spheres remains staggering and unexplained. Suggestively, more strongly sedimenting colloidal suspensions of hard spheres nucleate much faster than weakly…

We study the spontaneous nucleation and crystallization of linear and cyclic chains of flexibly connected hard spheres using extensive molecular dynamics simulations. To this end, we present a novel event-driven molecular dynamics…

The nucleation kinetics of the rotator phase in hard cuboctahedra, truncated octahedra, and rhombic dodecahedra is simulated via a combination of Forward Flux Sampling and Umbrella Sampling. For comparable degree of supersaturation, the…

We address the crystallization of monodisperse hard spheres in terms of the properties of finite- size crystalline clusters. By means of large scale event-driven Molecular Dynamics simulations, we study systems at different packing…

We present a computer simulation study on the crystal nucleation process in suspensions of hard spheres, fully taking into account the solvent hydrodynamics. If the dynamics of collodial crystallization were purely diffusive, the crystal…

We have carried out molecular dynamics simulations of the crystallization of hard spheres modelling colloidal systems that are studied in conventional and space-based experiments. We use microscopic probes to investigate the effects of…

We determined bulk crystal nucleation rates in aqueous suspensions of charged spheres at low metastability. Experiments were performed in dependence on electrolyte concen-tration and for two different particle number densities. The…

We consider the nature of the fluid-solid phase transition in a polydisperse mixture of hard spheres. For a sufficiently polydisperse mixture crystallisation occurs with simultaneous fractionation. At the fluid-solid boundary, a broad fluid…

We report on a large scale computer simulation study of crystal nucleation in hard spheres. Through a combined analysis of real and reciprocal space data, a picture of a two-step crystallization process is supported: First dense, amorphous…

We present a computer simulation study on crystal nucleation and growth in supersaturated suspensions of mono-disperse hard spheres induced by a triangular lattice substrate. The main result is that compressed substrates are wet by 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…

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…

During the processes of nucleation and growth of a precipitate cluster from a supersaturated solution, the diffusion flux between the cluster and the solution changes the solute concentration near the cluster-solution interface from its…

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…

The interplay between densification and positional ordering during the process of crystal nucleation is a greatly investigated topic. Even for the simplest colloidal model -- hard spheres -- there has been much debate regarding the…