Structural Phases in Non-Additive Soft-Disk Mixtures: Glasses, Substitutional Order, and Random Tilings

TL;DR

This paper investigates how relaxing the additivity condition in binary soft-disk mixtures leads to diverse structural phases, including glasses, substitutional order, and random tilings, with implications for understanding their dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces MD simulation analysis of non-additive soft-disk mixtures, revealing new structural phenomena like crystal-like accumulation and liquid-tiling transitions.

Findings

Evidence of crystal-like structure accumulation in metastable liquids

Observation of a liquid to random-tiling transition

Diverse structural phases in non-additive mixtures

Abstract

Relaxation of the additivity condition on the interaction length between unlike species in a binary mixture of soft disks opens up a rich variety of structures in both crystal and amorphous states with an associated diverse range of relaxation dynamics. We report on MD simulation studies of binary soft disks with negative deviations from additivity that include evidence of accumulation of crystal-like structures in metastable liquids prior to crystallization and the occurrence of a liquid to random-tiling transition.