Stability of Defectless Structures of Titanium Monoxide at High Pressures

JETP Letters - Titanium monoxide with the basis crystal structure B1 is of interest because of an anomalously high concentration of vacancies and diverse effects of atom–vacancy ordering. It...     

Pade spectroscopy of structural correlation functions: Application to liquid gallium

We propose the new method of fluid structure investigation based on numerical analytic continuation of structural correlation functions with Pade approximants. The method particularly allows extracting hidden structural features of disordered condensed matter systems from experimental diffraction data. The method has been applied to investigate the local order of liquid gallium, which has a non-trivial structure in both the liquid and solid states. Processing the correlation functions obtained from molecular dynamic simulations, we show the method proposed reveals non-trivial structural features of liquid gallium such as the spectrum of length-scales and the existence of different types of local clusters in the liquid.     

Variable reactivity and phase separation in patchy particle systems

ABSTRACT

Using statistical model, we study mechanisms of phase separation in a solution consisting of patchy particles, which are capable to form directed and saturated thermoreversible bonds. We focus on the impact of variable reactivity of patchy particles on the form of miscibility gap. We show that the variation of model parameters determining features of interparticle interaction makes it possible to obtain miscibility gaps of different types within the unified formalism. In particular, we uncover two different mechanisms of the formation of phase separation curves with lower critical solution temperature. The first mechanism is realised in the case of positive bonding energy; the second one can takes place when the energy of formation of two-bonded particles is lower than that for all other m-bonded ones. We conclude that the most interesting and non-trivial phase behavior is observed in the case of patchy particles with variable reactivity. Using rigorous statistical model, we uncover new mechanisms of phase separation in a solution consisting of patchy particles, which are capable to form directed and saturated thermoreversible bonds. This topic corresponds to state of the art in modern chemical physics. The results obtained shed light on interplay between features of non-isotropic interactions and phase behavior in both molecular and nanoparticle systems. We conclude that the most interesting and non-trivial phase behavior is observed in the case of patchy particles with variable reactivity.     

Complex singularities of the fluid velocity autocorrelation function

There are intensive debates regarding the nature of supercritical fluids: if their evolution from liquid-like to gas-like behavior is a continuous multistage process or there is a sharp well-defined crossover. Velocity auto-correlation function Z is the established detector of evolution of fluid particles dynamics. Usually, complex singularities of correlation functions give more information. For this reason, we investigate Z in complex plane of frequencies using numerical analytic continuation. We have found that naive picture with few isolated poles fails describing Z(ω) of one-component Lennard-Jones (LJ) fluid. Instead, we see the singularity manifold forming branch cuts extending approximately parallel to the real frequency axis. That suggests LJ velocity autocorrelation function is a multivalued function of complex frequency. The branch cuts are separated from the real axis by the well-defined “gap” whose width corresponds to an important time scale of a fluid characterizing crossover of system dynamics from kinetic to hydrodynamic regime. Our working hypothesis is that the branch cut origin is related to competition between one-particle dynamics and hydrodynamics. The observed analytic structure of Z is very stable under changes in the temperature; it survives at temperatures two orders of magnitude higher than the critical one.     

Simulated Cu–Zr glassy alloys: the impact of composition on icosahedral order

The structural properties of the simulated Cu_αZr_1-α glassy alloys are studied in the wide range of the copper concentration to clarify the impact of the composition on the number density of the icosahedral clusters. Both bond orientational order parameters and Voronoi tessellation methods are used to identify these clusters. Our analysis shows that abundance of the icosahedral clusters and the chemical composition of these clusters are essentially nonmonotonic versus and demonstrate local extrema. That qualitatively explains the existence of pinpoint compositions of high glass-forming ability observing in Cu Zr alloys. Finally, it has been shown that Voronoi method overestimates drastically the abundance of the icosahedral clusters in comparison with the bond orientational order parameters one.     

Statistical description of the sol-gel transition in systems with thermoreversible chemical bonds

A general statistical model is proposed for describing network-forming systems. The model is based on the representation of the partition function for all possible configurations of a thermoreversible network in the form of a functional integral over a scalar field. According to this model, two types of first-order phase transitions can occur in the systems under consideration: macroscopic phase separation with the structural phase transition due to the change in the configuration of the spatial network and the sol-gel transition due to the formation of a thermoreversible percolation cluster consisting of bound structural units. A detailed analysis is performed of the thermodynamic and structural properties of a solution of monomers that have f functional groups and can form thermoreversible chemical bonds. The influence of specific features of the chemical and volume interactions on the phase diagram of the system is investigated. The mutual position of the sol-gel transition line and the phase diagram is determined for different model parameters. It is revealed that two substantially different regimes of the behavior of the sol-gel transition line in the “temperature-volume fraction of structural units” plane are observed with a change in the rigidity of chemical bonds.