Displacive transformations in colloidal crystals may offer a pathway for increasing the diversity of accessible configurations without the need to engineer particle shape or interaction complexity. To date, binary crystals composed of spherically symmetric particles at specific size ratios have been formed that exhibit floppiness and facile routes for transformation into more rigid structures that are otherwise not accessible by direct nucleation and growth. There is evidence that such transformations, at least at the micrometer scale, are kinetically influenced by concomitant solvent motion that effectively induces hydrodynamic correlations between particles. Here, we study quantitatively the impact of such interactions on the transformation of binary bcc-CsCl analog crystals into close-packed configurations. We first employ principal-component analysis to stratify the explorations of a bcc-CsCl crystallite into orthogonal directions according to displacement. We then compute diffusion coefficients along the different directions using several dynamical models and find that hydrodynamic correlations, depending on their range, can either enhance or dampen collective particle motions. These two distinct effects work synergistically to bias crystallite deformations toward a subset of the available outcomes.
Continuum modeling of dissipative processes in materials often relies on strong phenomenological assumptions, as their derivation from underlying atomistic/particle models remains a major long-standing challenge. Here we show that the continuum evolution equations of a wide class of dissipative phenomena can be numerically obtained (in a discretized form) from fluctuations via an infinite-dimensional fluctuation-dissipation relation. A salient feature of the method is that these continuum equations can be fully pre-computed, enabling macroscopic simulations of arbitrary admissible initial conditions, without the need of any further microscopic simulations. We test this coarse-graining procedure on a one-dimensional non-linear diffusive process with known analytical solution, and obtain an excellent agreement for the density evolution. This illustrative example serves as a blueprint for a new multiscale paradigm, where full dissipative evolution equations-and not only parameters-can be numerically computed from lower scale data.
Dissipative processes abound in most areas of sciences and can often be abstractly written as ∂tz = K(z)δS(z)/δz, which is a gradient flow of the entropy S. Although various techniques have been developed to compute the entropy, the calculation of the operator K from underlying particle models is a major long-standing challenge. Here, we show that discretizations of diffusion operators K can be numerically computed from particle fluctuations via an infinite-dimensional fluctuationdissipation relation, provided the particles are in local equilibrium with Gaussian fluctuations. A salient feature of the method is that K can be fully pre-computed, enabling macroscopic simulations of arbitrary admissible initial data, without any need of further particle simulations. We test this coarse-graining procedure for a zero-range process in one space dimension and obtain an excellent agreement with the analytical solution for the macroscopic density evolution. This example serves as a blueprint for a new multiscale paradigm, where full dissipative evolution equations -and not only parameters -can be numerically computed from particles.
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