相关论文: The instability of Alexander-McTague crystals and …
We report a numerical study of the rate of crystal nucleation in a binary suspension of oppositely charged colloids. Two different crystal structures compete in the thermodynamic conditions under study. We find that the crystal phase that…
In recent computer simulations of a simple monatomic system interacting via the Dzugutov pair potential, freezing of the fluid into an equilibrium dodecagonal quasicrystal has been reported [M. Dzugutov, Phys. Rev. Lett. 70, 2924 (1993)].…
Systems with long-range interactions when quenced into a metastable state near the pseudo-spinodal exhibit nucleation processes that are quite different from the classical nucleation seen near the coexistence curve. In systems with…
Crystals with low latent heat are predicted to melt from an entropically stabilized body-centered cubic symmetry. At this weakly first-order transition, strongly correlated fluctuations are expected to emerge, which could change the nature…
Nucleation is considered near the pseudospinodal in a one-dimensional $\phi^4$ model with a non-conserved order parameter and long-range interactions. For a sufficiently large system or a system with slow relaxation to metastable…
Colloidal particles are often seen as big atoms that can be directly observed in real space. They are therefore playing an increasingly important role as model systems to study processes of interest in condensed matter physics such as…
We establish a condition for the perturbative stability of zero energy nodal points in the quasi-particle spectrum of superconductors in the presence of coexisting \textit{commensurate} orders. The nodes are found to be stable if the…
Studies of nucleation generally focus on the properties of the critical cluster, but the presence of defects within the crystal lattice means that the population of nuclei necessarily evolve through a distribution of pre-critical clusters…
Understanding the mechanism of nucleation of the stable phase inside the metastable parent phase during a first order phase transition has been a subject of outstanding interest in natural science. The problem becomes even more challenging…
The problem of heterogeneous nucleation of second-phase in alloys in the vicinity of elastic defects is considered. The defect can be a dislocation line or a crack tip residing in a crystalline solid. We use the Ginzburg-Landau equation to…
Dynamical density functional simulations reveal structural aspects of crystal nucleation in undercooled liquids: the first appearing solid is amorphous, which promotes the nucleation of bcc crystals, but suppresses the appearance of the fcc…
NaCl crystal nucleation from metastable solutions has long been considered to occur according to a single-step mechanism. Recent experimental observations suggest that NaCl crystals emerge from disordered intermediates which is seemingly at…
Crucial to gaining control over crystallisation in multicomponent materials or accurately modelling rheological behaviour of magma flows is to understand the mechanisms by which crystal nuclei form. The microscopic nature of such nuclei,…
In this work, we use large-scale molecular dynamics simulations coupled to free energy calculations to identify for the first time a limit of stability (spinodal) and a change in the nucleation mechanism in aqueous NaCl solutions. This is a…
Metastable phases may be spontaneously formed from other metastable phases through nucleation. Here we demonstrate the spontaneous formation of a metastable phase from an unstable equilibrium by spinodal decomposition, which leads to a…
For decades now, low-energy models of QCD have shown indications that a crystalline quark phase could be stable at high chemical potentials. Beyond models, however, there are numerous difficulties in investigating such a hypothesis in full…
Motivated by recent experiments on the itinerant helimagnet MnSi, we study general properties of helical spin crystals - magnetic structures obtained by superposing distinct spin spirals. An effective Landau description of helical spin…
We demonstrate that the instabilities of asymmetric nuclear matter at sub-saturation densities do not present two types of instabilities as usually discussed but a unique one. The associated order parameter is everywhere dominated by the…
For more than half a century, the structure of $^{12}$C, such as the ground band, has been understood to be well described by the three $\alpha$ cluster model based on a geometrical crystalline picture. On the contrary, recently it has been…
A surface instability is reported in thin nematic films of 5CB and 8CB, occurring near the nematic--isotropic phase transition. Although this instability leads to patterns reminiscent of spinodal dewetting, we show that it is actually based…