0000000000590077
AUTHOR
Sven Dorosz
Description of hard-sphere crystals and crystal-fluid interfaces: a comparison between density functional approaches and a phase-field crystal model.
In materials science the phase field crystal approach has become popular to model crystallization processes. Phase field crystal models are in essence Landau-Ginzburg-type models, which should be derivable from the underlying microscopic description of the system in question. We present a study on classical density functional theory in three stages of approximation leading to a specific phase field crystal model, and we discuss the limits of applicability of the models that result from these approximations. As a test system we have chosen the three--dimensional suspension of monodisperse hard spheres. The levels of density functional theory that we discuss are fundamental measure theory, a …
Crystallization in suspensions of hard spheres: a Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulation study
The crystallization of a metastable melt is one of the most important non-equilibrium phenomena in condensed matter physics, and hard sphere colloidal model systems have been used for several decades to investigate this process by experimental observation and computer simulation. Nevertheless, there is still an unexplained discrepancy between the simulation data and experimental nucleation rate densities. In this paper we examine the nucleation process in hard spheres using molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulation. We show that the crystallization process is mediated by precursors of low orientational bond-order and that our simulation data fairly match the experimental data sets.