Dresden 2009 – scientific programme
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CPP: Fachverband Chemische Physik und Polymerphysik
CPP 17: Confined Fluids
CPP 17.1: Talk
Tuesday, March 24, 2009, 09:30–09:45, ZEU 160
Solid-liquid phase transitions in hard spheres and colloid-polymer mixtures — •Tatyana Zykova-Timan1, Jürgen Horbach2, and Kurt Binder1 — 1Institut für Physik, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Staudinger Weg 7, 5509 Mainz — 2Institut für Materialphysik im Weltraum, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), 51170 Köln, Germany
We present the results of Monte Carlo (MC) simulations of liquid-to-crystal phase transitions in hard spheres and colloid-polymer mixtures, the latter modeled by the Asakura-Oosawa potential. In the traditional approaches such as thermodynamic integration or phase-switch MC, the coexistence point is computed from the estimates of bulk solid and liquid free energies. These methods are computationally demanding and do not provide any information about crystal growth kinetics.
On the contrary, we considered a direct simulation of solid-liquid coexistence in a slab geometry and obtained the melting point from an analysis of the interface velocity. Using Monte Carlo in the NPT ensemble we determined the coexistence pressures and kinetic growth coefficients. Their dependence on system size is investigated and compared to results reported in the literature. Moreover, the solid-liquid interface properties are studied including a careful analysis of finite size effects in the capillary wave spectrum.