ACES Trainee Presentation to the ACES Visiting Committee
Kipton Barros
Physics Department - Boston University
Friday - November 30, 2007
Physics Research Building - Room 595

"Glass forming, crystallization, and melting in a mean-field model."

We employ a model with bounded long-range repulsive interactions to study glass, crystalline, and fluid phases. It is known, but somewhat counterintuitive, that these phases exist in such a simple model. The long-range interactions allow the system to be understood through a field theory. We observe fluid to solid nucleation events and verify that the nucleating droplets match the numerical saddle point solutions of the free energy functional. In two and three dimensions these droplets have triangular and bcc symmetries, as expected. In one dimension, where Alexander-McTague type symmetry arguments cannot be satisfied, we find that nucleation does not occur, and that the fluid-solid transition is continuous.