2018/11/30 by Praveen K. Bommineni, Nydia Roxana Varela-Rosales, Marco Klement +1 · 1 citation
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Chemical physics #Condensed matter physics #Dispersity #Gaussian #Hard spheres #Material Dynamics and Properties #Materials science #Nanotechnology #Particle (ecology) #Physics #Pickering emulsions and particle stabilization #Polymer chemistry #Quantum mechanics #Quasicrystal #SPHERES #Statistical physics #Theoretical and Computational Physics #Thermodynamics #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.mtrl-sci #cond-mat.soft #nlin.AO #physics.comp-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.122.128005
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 128005 (2019) · 10 pages, 9 figures
arxiv created 2019/03/18 · openalex publication_date 2019/03/28 · arxiv updated 2019/04/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Colloids are rarely perfectly uniform but follow a distribution of sizes, shapes, and charges. This dispersity can be inherent (static) or develop and change over time (dynamic). Despite a long history of research, the conditions under which nonuniform particles crystallize and which crystal forms is still not well understood. Here, we demonstrate that hard spheres with Gaussian radius distribution and dispersity up to 19% always crystallize if compressed slowly enough, and they do so in surprisingly complex ways. This result is obtained by accelerating event-driven simulations with particle swap moves for static dispersity and particle resize moves for dynamic dispersity. Above 6% dispersity, AB2 Laves, AB13, and a region of Frank-Kasper phases are found. The Frank-Kasper region includes a quasicrystal approximant with Pearson symbol oS276. Our findings are relevant for ordering phenomena in soft matter and alloys.