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Michael Schmiedeberg

Publications and source records attributed to Michael Schmiedeberg.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

The scales of disorder in perfect quasicrystals

The classical dichotomy between crystalline order and amorphous disorder is increasingly challenged by novel states that lack conventional crystalline symmetries while retaining crystal-like properties. Quasicrystals occupy a distinctive position within this expanding framework by possessing long-range order without translational periodicity, thereby permitting arbitrary $N$-fold rotational symmetry. Paradoxically, far from their unique symmetry center, high-symmetry quasicrystals closely resemble disordered patterns, raising the question of how deterministic order can be detected. Here we show that increasing rotational symmetry progressively suppresses local statistical signatures of quasiperiodicity, while preserving its underlying exact long-range order. This order is thus concealed below an emergent crossover length that grows linearly with $N$. Therefore, as $N \rightarrow \infty$, the disorder-like regime expands without bound, defining a symmetry-controlled geometric critical point at which deterministic order and randomness become statistically indistinguishable over any finite observation window. For finite $N$, however, quasiperiodic order becomes detectable beyond this crossover, revealing a second emergent length scale that we identify as the size of a \textit{statistical unit cell} -- finite patches over which statistical properties recur despite the absence of conventional translational periodicity. In one dimension, the statistical-unit-cell size coincides with the crossover length, whereas in two dimensions it grows as $N^2$, remaining smaller than the size of typical approximants and establishing a hierarchy of emergent length scales. Together, the disorder-to-order crossover and statistical unit cells provide a quantitative framework connecting crystals, quasicrystals, and amorphous matter, showing how apparent disorder can emerge from purely deterministic geometry.

cond-mat.stat-mech

Dilute gel networks vs. clumpy gels in colloid-polymer mixtures

Using Brownian dynamics simulations we study gel-forming colloid-polymer mixtures. The focus of this article lies on the differences of dense and dilute gel networks in terms of structure formation both on a local and a global level. We apply reduction algorithms and observe that dilute networks and dense gels differ in the way structural properties like the thickness of strands emerge. We also analyze the percolation behavior and find that two different regimes of percolation exist which might be responsible for structural differences. In dilute networks we confirm that solidity is mainly a consequence of pentagonal bipyramids forming in the network. In dense gels also tetrahedral structures influence solidity.

cond-mat.soft

Occurrence of connected clusters in motility-induced phase-separated states of persistent active particles at zero temperature

To study the interplay of jamming, cluster formation, and motility-induced phase separation in the zero temperature limit in two dimensions, we consider a simple model system consisting of a bidisperse mixture of disks that are only subject to a repulsion force in case of overlaps and an active force. The orientation of the disks is chosen randomly in the beginning and does not change anytime during the simulation thus corresponding to an infinite persistence length. Simulations with our model system reveal that jammed clusters of particles occur in the dense phase of a phase-separated state in case of intermediate values of the ratio of active to repulsive force. However, for smaller activities there are only a few overlaps between the particles in the dense phase and the coexistence region ends at a packing fraction below the onset of jamming. Finally, for large activities small clusters corresponding to small patches of the dense phase are found that are unstable due to the activity. Our findings on how jamming and phase separation are related are relevant to many active particle systems whose zero temperature and long persistence limits correspond to our model system.

cond-mat.soft

Phase Field Crystal model for particles with n-fold rotational symmetry in two dimensions

We introduce a Phase Field Crystal (PFC) model for particles with n-fold rotational symmetry in two dimensions. Our approach is based on a free energy functional that depends on the reduced one-particle density, the strength of the orientation, and the direction of the orientation, where all these order parameters depend on the position. The functional is constructed such that for particles with axial symmetry (i. e. n = 2) the PFC model for liquid crystals as introduced by H. Löwen [J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 22, 364105 (2010)] is recovered. We discuss the stability of the functional and explore phases that occur for $1 \leq n \leq 6$. In addition to isotropic, nematic, stripe, and triangular order, we also observe cluster crystals with square, rhombic, honeycomb, and even quasicrystalline symmetry. The n-fold symmetry of the particles corresponds to the one that can be realized for colloids with symmetrically arranged patches. We explain how both, repulsive as well as attractive patches, are described in our model.

cond-mat.soft

Investigating 3D printed Cartesian Divers

Despite the difficult circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemics, physics students can tackle interesting questions that are part of physics competitions as the German Physicists' Tournament (GPT) 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemics in 2020, many competitions such as the GPT are held online. Furthermore, the usual options of equipment offered by the supervising university institutions could not be used by the students. The problems of the GPT 2020 therefore had to be chosen in such a way that they could be examined at home using simple means. One of these supposedly simple but profound experiments - the Cartesian divers - is described in this article. By using 3D printing, the relevant variables could be varied in a controlled manner and the theoretical model for Cartesian divers could be examined experimentally.

physics.ed-ph

Active Brownian and inertial particles in disordered environments: short-time expansion of the mean-square displacement

We consider an active Brownian particle moving in a disordered two-dimensional energy or motility landscape. The averaged mean-square-displacement (MSD) of the particle is calculated analytically within a systematic short-time expansion. As a result, for overdamped particles, both an external random force field and disorder in the self-propulsion speed induce ballistic behaviour adding to the ballistic regime of an active particle with sharp self-propulsion speed. Spatial correlations in the force and motility landscape contribute only to the cubic and higher order powers in time for the MSD. Finally, for inertial particles two superballistic regimes are found where the scaling exponent of the MSD with time is $α=3$ and $α=4$. We confirm our theoretical predictions by computer simulations. Moreover they are verifiable in experiments on self-propelled colloids in random environments.

cond-mat.soft

Structural and dynamical properties of gel networks

The competition of depletion attractions and longer-ranged repulsions between colloidal particles in colloid-polymer mixtures leads to the formation of heterogeneous gel-like structures. For instance, gel networks, i.e., states where the colloids arrange in thin strands that span the whole system occur at low packing fractions for attractions that are stronger than those at the binodal line of equilibrium liquid-fluid phase separation. By using Brownian dynamics simulations we explore the formation, structure, and ageing dynamics of gel networks. We determine reduced network that focus on the essential connections in a gel network. We compare the observed properties to those of bulky gels or cluster fluids. Our results demonstrate that both the structure as well as the (often slow) dynamics of the stable or meta-stable heterogenous states in colloid-polymer mixtures possess distinct features on various length and time scales and thus are richly divers.

cond-mat.soft

Athermal Jamming vs. glassy dynamics for particles with exponentially decaying repulsive pair interaction potentials with a cutoff

We study athermal jamming as well as the thermal glassy dynamics in systems composed of spheres that interact according to repulsive interactions that exponentially decay as a function of distance. As usual, a cutoff is employed in the simulations. While the athermal jamming transition that is determined by trying to remove overlaps is found to depend on the arbitrary and therefore unphysical choice of the cutoff, we do not find any athermal jamming transition or crossover that only relies on the physical decay length. In contrast, the glassy dynamics mainly depends on the decay length. Our findings constitute another demonstration of the fact that the athermal jamming transition is not related to thermal glassy dynamics. In addition, we argue that interactions without sharp physical cutoff should be considered more often as a model system in jamming. By exploring how widely-used theoretical approaches or methods of analysis in the field of jamming have to be changed in order to not depend on unphysical cutoffs will lead to deeper insights into the nature of athermal and thermal jamming.

cond-mat.soft

Time scales of inertial motion in the collective dynamics of underdamped active phase field crystal systems

Many active matter systems, mostly on the microscopic scale, are well approximated as overdamped, meaning that any inertial momentum is immediately dissipated by the environment. On the other hand, especially for macroscopic active systems but also for many mesoscopic ones the time scale of inertial motion can become large enough to be relevant for the dynamics. This raises the question how collective dynamics in active matter is influenced by inertia. In this article we implement and study an underdamped active phase field crystal model. We focus on how the collective dynamics changes with the time scale of inertial motion. While the state diagram stays unaltered in this modification, the relaxation time scale towards the steady state considerably increases with particle mass. Our numerical results suggest that transiently stable rotating clusters of density peaks act as defects which need to decay before the final state of global collective motion forms. We extract the formation and decay times quantitatively. Finally, we give a physical intuition for the formation and decay of rotating clusters to qualitatively explain how the extracted times depend on mass.

cond-mat.soft

Mean field approach of dynamical pattern formation in underdamped active matter with short-ranged alignment and distant anti-alignment interactions

Many active matter systems, especially on the microscopic scale, are well approximated as overdamped, meaning that any inertial momentum is immediately dissipated by the environment. On the other hand, especially for macroscopic active systems but also for many mesoscopic systems the time scale of inertial motion can become large enough to be relevant for the dynamics. This raises the question how collective dynamics and the resulting states in active matter are influenced by inertia. Therefore, we propose a coarsegrained continuum model for underdamped active matter based on a mean field description for passive systems. Furthermore, we apply the model to a system with interactions that support an alignment on short distances and an antialignment on longer length scales as known in the context of pattern formation due to orientational interactions. Our numerical calculations of the underand overdamped dynamics both predict a structured laning state. However, activity induced convective flows that are only present in the underdamped model destabilize this state when the anti-alignment is weakened, leading to a collective motion state which does not occur in the overdamped limit. A turbulent transition regime between the two states can be characterized by strong density fluctuations and the absence of global ordering.

cond-mat.soft

Energy landscape description of the clustering transition for active soft spheres

For a system consisting of active soft spheres in three dimensions, we study the transition from a fluid where overlaps between particles can only occur for a short time after a collision to a state where clusters of overlapping particles persist for a long time. In order to determine the properties of the transition, we explore the energy landscape of the system in a similar way as it is done for the determination of the athermal or thermal jamming transition. Note that for zero temperature the competition of particles that attach to existing clusters and particles that detach due to thermal effects does not arise. Therefore, here we do not study such a competition because we consider systems at small or zero energy. Instead, we explore at which packing fractions and what activities cluster formation can occur at all. In case of an athermal system the transition between systems where no clusters develop at all and systems where stable clusters are found is a first order transition for packing fractions below 0.55 while the transition is continuous in case of larger packing fractions. In case of thermal systems the transition is continuous everywhere. While our approach does not deal with the real dynamics of the system, it reveals the nature of the clustering transition and it enables a deeper insight in the consequences of thermal fluctuations and the relation of the clustering transition to jamming. Though Brownian timescales diverge in athermal systems, the activity that we consider can be compared to the active velocity in other simulations if the later is measured in units of the particle size divided by an elastic time scale.

cond-mat.soft

Phasonic Diffusion and Self-confinement of Decagonal Quasicrystals in Hyperspace

We introduce a novel simulation method that is designed to explore fluctuations of the phasonic degrees of freedom in decagonal colloidal quasicrystals. Specifically, we attain and characterise thermal equilibrium of the phason ensemble via Monte Carlo simulations with particle motions restricted to elementary phasonic flips. We find that, at any temperature, the random tiling ensemble is strongly preferred over the minimum phason-strain quasicrystal. Phasonic flips are the dominant carriers of diffusive mass transport in physical space. Sub-diffusive transients suggest cooperative flip behaviour on short time scales. In complementary space, particle mobility is geometrically restricted to a thin ring around the acceptance domain, resulting in self-confinement and persistent phasonic order.

cond-mat.soft

Stabilizing quasicrystals composed of patchy colloids by narrowing the patch width

We explore the behavior of two-dimensional patchy colloidal particles with 8 or 10 symmetrically arranged patches by employing Monte-Carlo simulations. The particles interact according to an isotropic pair potential that possesses only one typical length. The patches lead to additional attractions that are anisotropic and depend on the relative orientation of two neighboring particles. We investigate the assembled structures with a special interest in quasicrystals. We found that the patch width is of great importance: Only in case of narrow patch widths we are able to observe metastable octagonal and decagonal quasicrystals, while dodecagonal quasicrystals can also occur for broad patches. These results are important to understand the role of interactions with preferred binding angles in order to obtain quasicrystals. Our findings suggest that in case of sharp binding angles, as they occur in metallic alloys, octagonal and decagonal symmetries might be observed more often than in systems with less sharp binding angles as it is the case in soft matter systems where dodecagonal quasicrystals dominate.

cond-mat.soft

Stability of particles in two-dimensional quasicrystals against phasonic perturbations

We investigate particles in two-dimensional quasicrystalline interference patterns and present a method to determine for each particle at which phasonic displacement a phasonic flip occurs. By mapping all particles into characteristic areas of reduced phononic and phasonic displacements, we identify the particles that are close to edges of these areas and can easily flip. In contrast, the particles in the center are hardly affected by phasonic fluctuations. Our results are important e.g. for light-induced colloidal structures or cold atomic gases in laser traps. In addition, our approach can help to predict how thermal fluctuations induce phasonic flips in intrinsic quasicrystals with structures close to interference patterns.

cond-mat.soft

The thermal jamming transition of soft harmonic disks in two dimensions

By exploring the properties of the energy landscape of a bidisperse system of soft harmonic disks in two dimensions we determine the thermal jamming transition. To be specific, we study whether the ground state of the system where the particle do not overlap can be reached within a reasonable time. Starting with random initial configurations, the energy landscape is probed by energy minimization steps as in case of athermal jamming and in addition steps where an energy barrier can be crossed with a small but non-zero probability. For random initial conditions we find that as a function of packing fraction the thermal jamming transition, i.e. the transition from a state where all overlaps can be removed to an effectively non-ergodic state where one cannot get rid of the overlaps, occurs at a packing fraction of $ϕ_G=0.74$, which is smaller than the transition packing fraction of athermal jamming at $ϕ_J=0.842$. Furthermore, we show that the thermal jamming transition is in the universality class of directed percolation and therefore is fundamentally different from the athermal jamming transition.

cond-mat.soft

Temperature dependence of the transition packing fraction of thermal jamming in a harmonic soft sphere system

The glassy dynamics of soft harmonic spheres is often mapped onto the dynamics of hard spheres by considering an effective diameter for the soft particles and therefore an effective packing fraction. While in this approach the thermal fluctuations within valleys of the energy landscape are covered, the crossing of energy barriers from one valley into another usually is neglected. Here we argue - motivated by studies of the glass transition based on explorations of the energy landscape - that the crossing of energy barriers can be attributed by an effective decrease of the glass transition packing fraction with increasing temperature T according to T^{0.2}. Furthermore, we reanalyzing data of soft sphere simulations. Since fitting scaling laws to simulation data always allows for some arbitrariness, we cannot prove based on the simulation data that our idea of a shift of the glass transition packing fraction due to barrier crossings is the only possible way to explain the discrepancies that have been observed previously. However, we show that a possible explanation of the simulation data is given by our approach to characterize the dynamics of soft spheres by both, the previously-considered temperature-dependent effective packing fraction due to the increase of the mean overlap between neighboring particles with stronger thermal fluctuations and the newly introduced increase of the glass transition packing with an increasing probability of barrier crossings.

cond-mat.soft

Ergodicity breaking transition in a glassy soft sphere system at small but non-zero temperatures

While the glass transition at non-zero temperature seems to be hard to access for experimental, theoretical, or simulation studies, jamming at zero temperature has been explored in great detail. It is a widely discussed question whether this athermal jamming transition is related to the glass transition. Motivated by the exploration of the energy landscape that has been successfully used to describe athermal jamming, we introduce a new method to determine whether the configuration space of a soft sphere system can be explored within a reasonable timescale or not, i.e., whether the system is ergodic or effectively non-ergodic. While in case of athermal jamming for a given random starting configuration only the local energy minimum is determined, we allow the thermally excited crossing of energy barriers. Interestingly, we observe that a transition exists where the system becomes effectively non-ergodic if the density is increased. In the limit of small but non-zero temperatures the density where the ergodicity breaking transition occurs approaches a value that is independent of temperature and below the transition density of athermal jamming. This confirms recent computer simulation studies where athermal jamming occurs deep inside the glass phase. In addition, with our method we determined the critical behavior of the ergodicity breaking transition and show that it is in the universality class of directed percolation. Therefore, our approach not only makes the transition from an ergodic to an effectively non-ergodic systems easily accessible and helps to reveal its universality class but also shows that it is fundamentally different from athermal jamming.

cond-mat.soft

Self-assembly of complex structures in colloid-polymer mixtures

If particles interact according to isotropic pair potentials that favor multiple length scales, in principle a large variety of different complex structures can be achieved by self-assembly. We present, motivate, and discuss a conjecture for the occurrence of non-trivial (i.e., non-triangular) orderings based on newly-introduced enthalpy-like pair potentials, the capability of which we demonstrate for the specific example of colloid-polymer mixtures. Upon examining the phase behavior of two-dimensional colloid-polymer mixtures, which can also be realized in experiments, we observe that non-trivial structures only occur in the vicinity of selected densities where triangular ordering is suppressed by the pair potential. Close to these densities, a large number of different phases self-assemble that correspond to tilings containing triangular, rhombic, square, hexagonal, and pentagonal tiles, and including some of the Archimedean tilings. We obtain the ground-state energies by minimizing the corresponding lattice sums with respect to particle positions in a unit cell as well as cell geometry and verify the occurrence of selected phases at finite temperatures by using Brownian Dynamics simulations. All reported phases should be accessible in experiments and, in addition, our work provides a manual on how to find the regions of non-trivial phases in parameter space for complex pair interactions in general.

cond-mat.soft