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Confocal Imaging of Confined Quiescent and Flowing Colloid-polymer Mixtures
Published on: May 20, 2014
Energy landscapes of planar colloidal clusters
John W R Morgan1, David J Wales
1University Chemical Laboratories, Lensfield Road, Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK.
Abstract:
A short-ranged pairwise Morse potential is used to model colloidal clusters with planar morphologies. Potential and free energy global minima as well as rearrangement paths, obtained by basin-hopping global optimisation and discrete path sampling, are characterised. The potential and free energy landscapes are visualised using disconnectivity graphs. The short-ranged potential is found to favour close-packed structures, with the potential energy primarily controlled by the number of nearest neighbour contacts. In the case of quasi-degeneracy the free energy global minimum may differ from the potential energy global minimum. This difference is due to symmetry effects, which result in a higher entropy for structures with lower symmetry.
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