No Arabic abstract
We present evidence that the concurrent existence of two populations of particles with different effective diameters is not a prerequisite for the occurrence of anomalous phase behaviors in systems of particles interacting through spherically-symmetric unbounded potentials. Our results show that an extremely weak softening of the interparticle repulsion, yielding a single nearest-neighbor separation, is able to originate a wide spectrum of unconventional features including reentrant melting, solid polymorphism, as well as thermodynamic, dynamic, and structural anomalies. These findings extend the possibility of anomalous phase behavior to a class of systems much broader than currently assumed.
We study the phase behavior of a classical system of particles interacting through a strictly convex soft-repulsive potential which, at variance with the pairwise softened repulsions considered so far in the literature, lacks a region of downward or zero curvature. Nonetheless, such interaction is characterized by two length scales, owing to the presence of a range of interparticle distances where the repulsive force increases, for decreasing distance, much more slowly than in the adjacent regions. We investigate, using extensive Monte Carlo simulations combined with accurate free-energy calculations, the phase diagram of the system under consideration. We find that the model exhibits a fluid-solid coexistence line with multiple re-entrant regions, an extremely rich solid polymorphism with solid-solid transitions, and water-like anomalies. In spite of the isotropic nature of the interparticle potential, we find that, among the crystal structures in which the system can exist, there are also a number of non-Bravais lattices, such as cI16 and diamond.
A necessary condition for the validity of the linear viscoelastic model for a (passive) polymeric cylinder with an ultrasonic hysteresis-type absorption submerged in a non-viscous fluid requires that the absorption efficiency is positive (Qabs > 0) satisfying the law of the conservation of energy. This condition imposes restrictions on the values attributed to the normalized absorption coefficients for the compressional and shear-wave wavenumbers for each partial-wave mode n. The forbidden values produce negative axial radiation force, absorption and extinction efficiencies, as well as an enhancement of the scattering efficiency, not in agreement with the conservation of energy law. Numerical results for the radiation force, extinction, absorption and scattering efficiencies are performed for three viscoelastic (VE) polymer cylinders immersed in a non-viscous host liquid (i.e. water) with particular emphasis on the shear-wave absorption coefficient of the cylinder, the dimensionless size parameter and the partial-wave mode number n. Mathematical constraints are established for the non-dimensional absorption coefficients of the longitudinal and shear waves for a cylinder (i.e. 2D case) and a sphere (i.e. 3D case) in terms of the sound velocities in the VE material. The analysis suggests that the domain of validity for any viscoelastic model describing acoustic attenuation inside a lossy cylinder (or sphere) in a non-viscous fluid must be verified based upon the optical theorem.
The effective pair potentials between different kinds of dendrimers in solution can be well approximated by appropriate Gaussian functions. We find that in binary dendrimer mixtures the range and strength of the effective interactions depend strongly upon the specific dendrimer architecture. We consider two different types of dendrimer mixtures, employing the Gaussian effective pair potentials, to determine the bulk fluid structure and phase behavior. Using a simple mean field density functional theory (DFT) we find good agreement between theory and simulation results for the bulk fluid structure. Depending on the mixture, we find bulk fluid-fluid phase separation (macro-phase separation) or micro-phase separation, i.e., a transition to a state characterized by undamped periodic concentration fluctuations. We also determine the inhomogeneous fluid structure for confinement in spherical cavities. Again, we find good agreement between the DFT and simulation results. For the dendrimer mixture exhibiting micro-phase separation, we observe rather striking pattern formation under confinement.
We investigate the phase behavior of a single-component system in 3 dimensions with spherically-symmetric, pairwise-additive, soft-core interactions with an attractive well at a long distance, a repulsive soft-core shoulder at an intermediate distance, and a hard-core repulsion at a short distance, similar to potentials used to describe liquid systems such as colloids, protein solutions, or liquid metals. We showed [Nature {bf 409}, 692 (2001)] that, even with no evidences of the density anomaly, the phase diagram has two first-order fluid-fluid phase transitions, one ending in a gas--low-density liquid (LDL) critical point, and the other in a gas--high-density liquid (HDL) critical point, with a LDL-HDL phase transition at low temperatures. Here we use integral equation calculations to explore the 3-parameter space of the soft-core potential and we perform molecular dynamics simulations in the interesting region of parameters. For the equilibrium phase diagram we analyze the structure of the crystal phase and find that, within the considered range of densities, the structure is independent of the density. Then, we analyze in detail the fluid metastable phases and, by explicit thermodynamic calculation in the supercooled phase, we show the absence of the density anomaly. We suggest that this absence is related to the presence of only one stable crystal structure.
A first principle prediction of the binary nanoparticle phase diagram assembled by solvent evaporation has eluded theoretical approaches. In this paper, we show that a binary system interacting through Lennard-Jones (LJ) potential contains all experimental phases in which nanoparticles are effectively described as quasi hard spheres. We report a phase diagram consisting of 53 equilibrium phases, whose stability is quite insensitive to the microscopic details of the potentials, thus giving rise to some type of universality. Furthermore, we show that binary lattices may be understood as consisting of certain particle clusters, i.e. motifs, which provide a generalization of the four conventional Frank-Kasper polyhedral units. Our results show that meta-stable phases share the very same motifs as equilibrium phases. We discuss the connection with packing models, phase diagrams with repulsive potentials and the prediction of likely experimental superlattices.