Weconsider the steadymotion of a twinning dislocation in a Frenkel–Kontorova latticewith a double-well substrate potential that has a non-degenerate spinodal region. Semi-analytical traveling wave solutions are constructed for the piecewise quadratic potential, and their stability and further effects of nonlinearity are investigated numerically. We show that the width of the spinodal region and...

The formation of a patterned nanostructure in an AgCo/Pt/MgO~001! thin film is simulated by a technique of combining molecular dynamics and phase-field theory. The dislocation ~strain! network existing in Pt/MgO is used as a template whose pattern is transferred to the AgCo phase in spinodal decomposition, resulting in regular arrays of Co islands that are attracted by the dislocations. The inf...

The effects of adding AB diblock copolymers to A/B binary blends on the structure and thermodynamics of critical nuclei are studied using the self-consistent field theory. At a fixed ratio of the amount of the two homopolymers, depending on the degree of polymerization and composition of the diblocks, their addition to the blends can either increase or decrease the nucleation free energy barrie...

The morphology of solution-cast, phase-separated polymers becomes finer with increasing solvent evaporation rate. We address this observation theoretically for a model polymer where demixing is induced by steady solvent evaporation. In contrast to what is the case for a classical, thermal quench involving immiscible blends, the spinodal instability initially develops slowly and the associated l...

We consider a lattice model for three-component systems in which the lattice bonds are covered by molecules of type AA, BB, and AB, and the only interactions are between the molecular ends of a common lattice site. The model is equivalent to the standard Ising model, and the coexistence curves for different lattices and/or some specific form of the interactions have been previously investigated...

Recently, there has been some interest for building supersymmetric models of double inflation. These models, realistic from a particle physics point of view, predict a broken-scale-invariant power spectrum of primordial cosmological perturbations, that may explain eventual non-trivial features in the present matter power spectrum. In previous works, the primordial spectrum was calculated using ...

The very general ShamsundarMurali cubic equation is used to interpolate p-v-T data into the metastable and unstable regions. This y ields a spinodal line that closely matches the homogeneous nucleation limit predicted by an improved kinetic theory. Only the pressure, the saturated liquid and vapor volumes, and the liquid com­ pressibility at saturation, as well as one compressed liquid data poi...

Iron cobaltite powders CoxFe3ÿxO4 (1rxr2.46) were synthesized with compositions in between the cobalt ferrite CoFe2O4 and Co2.46Fe0.54O4. The cationic distribution of pure spinel phases was determined by Mössbauer spectroscopy: as Co content increases in the spinel oxide, Co cations replace Fe cations in the octahedral sites and Co cations migrate from octahedral to tetrahedral sites. Saturatio...

A re-entrant gas-liquid spinodal was proposed as a possible explanation of the apparent divergence of the compressibility and specific heat off supercooling water. Such a counter-intuitive possibility, e.g., a liquid that becomes unstable to gas-like fluctuations on cooling at positive pressure, has never been observed, neither in real substances nor in off-lattice simulations. More recently, s...

Amorphous solids increase their stress as a function of an applied strain until a mechanical yield point whereupon the stress cannot increase anymore, afterward exhibiting a steady state with a constant mean stress. In stress-controlled experiments, the system simply breaks when pushed beyond this mean stress. The ubiquity of this phenomenon over a huge variety of amorphous solids calls for a g...