Regensburg 2016 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 27: Poster - Statistical Physics, Critical Phenomena, Brownian motion

DY 27.4: Poster

Tuesday, March 8, 2016, 18:15–21:00, Poster C

The Voronoi liquid — •Céline Ruscher, Jörg Baschnagel, and Jean Farago — Institut Charles Sadron, Strasbourg, France

Voronoi tessellations are defined as a mathematical partition of the space where a cell containing the point of interest is defined through the points of space which are the closest from this point than from any other. In soft matter physics Voronoi tessellations are widely used to probe the local environnement of particles.

We describe here a new model of fluid called the Voronoi fluid where the force field is directly expressed through the intrinsic properties of the Voronoi tessellations. Due to its definition this monodisperse fluid presents many-body interactions and there is no excluded volume. Moreover the force field derives from a potential energy which exhibits scaling properties.

Thermodynamics and microscopic observables of the Voronoi fluid are both investigated through numerical simulations. Similarities with simple liquids have been observed however some differences occur. For instance an unexpected relation between the pair correlation function and the chemical potential has been found and the dynamic structure factor exhibits an unusual behavior in the hydrodynamic regime.

Finally we observed that when the Voronoi fluid crystallizes into a BCC an atypical behavior appears. Below the melting point particles move leaving the whole structure unchanged. As the motion seems to be a collective phenomenon these rearrangements appear to be a good indicator that the model can be extended to probe glass-forming systems.