Correlations and Freezing in Steadily Settling Suspensions

Rangan Lahiri; Sriram Ramaswamy

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arXiv · cond-mat/9811052

Correlations and Freezing in Steadily Settling Suspensions

Rangan Lahiri·Sriram Ramaswamy

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Abstract

We study the liquid-solid transition in a collection of interacting particles moving through a dissipative medium under the action of a constant, spatially uniform external force, e.g. a charge-stabilized suspension in a fluidized bed or a flux-point lattice moving through a thin, current-carrying slab of type II superconductor. The mobility of a given region in these systems is in general a function of the local concentration. We show that the structure factor peak is suppressed in an anisotropic manner as a result of this effect, resulting in a shift of the crystal-liquid phase boundary towards the crystal side. A nonequilibrium phase diagram is presented.

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Rangan Lahiri, Sriram Ramaswamy. 1998-11-04. Correlations and Freezing in Steadily Settling Suspensions. https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9811052

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