BACKGROUND Colloids consist of solid or liquid particles, each about a few hundred
nanometers in size, dispersed in a fluid and kept suspended by thermal fluctuations …

The simplicity of hard spheres as a model system is deceptive. Although the particles
interact solely through volume exclusion, that nevertheless suffices for a wealth of static and …

Operation speed is a key challenge in phase-change random-access memory (PCRAM)
technology, especially for achieving subnanosecond high-speed cache memory …

Nucleation plays a critical role in many physical and biological phenomena that range from
crystallization, melting and evaporation to the formation of clouds and the initiation of …

A great success of solid state physics comes from the characterization of crystal structures in
the reciprocal (wave vector) space. The power of structural characterization in Fourier space …

Water is the most abundant liquid on earth and also the substance with the largest number
of anomalies in its properties. It is a prerequisite for life and as such a most important subject …

The recent discovery of non-classical crystal nucleation pathways has revealed the role of
fluctuations in the liquid structural order, not considered in classical nucleation theory. On …

High-temperature metastable phases exhibit superior characteristics compared to those of
thermodynamically stable phases at room temperature. Although optimization of the …

Amorphous solids, or glasses, are distinguished from crystalline solids by their lack of long-
range structural order. At the level of two-body structural correlations, glassformers show no …

Two or more liquid states may exist even for single-component substances, which is known
as liquid polymorphism, and the transition between them is called liquid–liquid transition …