Liquid-liquid Phase Transitions in Silicon

Phase transitions in liquid crystals

Liquid-liquid phase transition in Stillinger-Weber silicon

It was recently demonstrated that the Stillinger-Weber silicon undergoes a liquidliquid first-order phase transition deep into the supercooled region (Sastry and Angell, Nature Materials 2, 739 (2003)). Here we study the effects of perturbations on this phase transition. We show that the order of the liquid-liquid transition changes with negative pressure. We also find that the liquid-liquid tr...

Interpenetration as a mechanism for liquid-liquid phase transitions.

We study simple lattice systems to demonstrate the influence of interpenetrating bond networks on phase behavior. We promote interpenetration by using a Hamiltonian with a weakly repulsive interaction with nearest neighbors and an attractive interaction with second-nearest neighbors. In this way, bond networks will form between second-nearest neighbors, allowing for two (locally) distinct netwo...

Liquid-liquid phase transitions for soft-core attractive potentials.

Using event-driven molecular dynamics simulations, we study a three-dimensional one-component system of spherical particles interacting via a discontinuous potential combining a repulsive square soft core and an attractive square well. In the case of a narrow attractive well, it has been shown that this potential has two metastable gas-liquid critical points. Here we systematically investigate ...

Photoinduced phase transitions in liquid crystalline systems

In recent years, a field of research that is growing steadily is the photoinduced phenomenon in which the incident light itself brings about molecular ordering/ disordering of the liquid crystalline system. This particular aspect of photonics, in which light can be controlled by light as a stimulus, is being proposed as the future technology for high-speed information processing and photochromi...