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Published on: May 20, 2014
Lattice energies for crystals of colloidal spheroids
P Schiller1, S Krüger, M Wahab
1Department of Physical Chemistry, TU Bergakademie Freiberg, Freiberg, Germany.
Abstract:
Attractive interactions between adjacent spheroids and excluded volume effects favor their parallel alignment. Parallel spheroids can be arranged into a variety of densely packed two-dimensional and three-dimensional lattice configurations. All of these configurations turn out to have the same lattice energy. A similar degeneracy is also found for several classes of lattices with lower volume density. We discuss implications of this degeneracy for the stability of colloidal crystals consisting of spheroids.
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