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Updated: May 19, 2026

Methods of Ex Situ and In Situ Investigations of Structural Transformations: The Case of Crystallization of Metallic Glasses
Published on: June 7, 2018
Phase diagram of hard snowman-shaped particles
Matthew Dennison1, Kristina Milinković, Marjolein Dijkstra
1Soft Condensed Matter, Debye Institute for Nanomaterials Science, Utrecht University, Princetonplein 5, 3584 CC Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Abstract:
We present the phase diagram of hard snowman-shaped particles calculated using Monte Carlo simulations and free energy calculations. The snowman particles consist of two hard spheres rigidly attached at their surfaces. We find a rich phase behavior with isotropic, plastic crystal, and aperiodic crystal phases. The crystalline phases found to be stable for a given sphere diameter ratio correspond mostly to the close packed structures predicted for equimolar binary hard-sphere mixtures of the same diameter ratio. However, our results also show several crystal-crystal phase transitions, with structures with a higher degree of degeneracy found to be stable at lower densities, while those with the best packing are found to be stable at higher densities.
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