Novel self-assembled morphologies from isotropic interactions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how isotropic interactions in particle systems lead to novel self-assembled structures, explaining their formation through symmetry breaking and validating predictions with simulations.

Contribution

It introduces an analytic framework based on the spherical spin model to predict symmetry breaking and phase diagrams in isotropic particle systems.

Findings

Novel aggregated structures observed at low temperatures.

Predicted critical particle number for symmetry breaking.

Phase diagram matches simulation results.

Abstract

We present results from particle simulations with isotropic medium range interactions in two dimensions. At low temperature novel types of aggregated structures appear. We show that these structures can be explained by spontaneous symmetry breaking in analytic solutions to an adaptation of the spherical spin model. We predict the critical particle number where the symmetry breaking occurs and show that the resulting phase diagram agrees well with results from particle simulations.