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Updated: Mar 30, 2026

Orientational Transition in a Liquid Crystal Triggered by the Thermodynamic Growth of Interfacial Wetting Sheets
Published on: May 15, 2017
Calculating the role of composition in the anisotropy of solid-liquid interface energy using phase-field-crystal
Bernadine A Jugdutt1, Nana Ofori-Opoku1,2,3,4, Nikolas Provatas1
1Department of Physics, Centre for the Physics of Materials, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
Abstract:
This work uses Ginzburg-Landau theory derived from a recent structural phase-field-crystal model of binary alloys developed by the authors to study the roles of concentration, temperature, and pressure on the interfacial energy anisotropy of a solid-liquid front. It is found that the main contribution to the change in anisotropy with concentration arises from a change in preferred crystallographic orientation controlled by solute-dependent changes in the two-point density correlation function of a binary alloy, a mechanism that leads to such phenomena as solute-induced elastic strain and dislocation-assisted solute clustering. Our results are consistent with experimental observations in recent studies by Rappaz et al. [J. Fife, P. Di Napoli, and M. Rappaz, Metall. Mater. Trans. A 44, 5522 (2013)]. This is the first PFC work, to our knowledge, to incorporate temperature, pressure, and density into the thermodynamic description of alloys.
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