arXiv subjects

Robert E. Grisenti

Publications and source records attributed to Robert E. Grisenti.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2020

Crystal growth rates in supercooled atomic liquid mixtures

Crystallization is a fundamental process in materials science, providing the primary route for the realization of a wide range of new materials. Crystallization rates are also considered to be useful probes of glass-forming ability. At the microscopic level, crystallization is described by the classical crystal nucleation and growth theories, yet in general solid formation is a far more complex process. In particular, the observation of apparently different crystal growth regimes in many binary liquid mixtures greatly challenges our understanding of crystallization. Here, we study by experiments, theory and computer simulations the crystallization of supercooled mixtures of argon and krypton, showing that crystal growth rates in these systems can be reconciled with existing crystal growth models only by explicitly accounting for the non-ideality of the mixtures. Our results highlight the importance of thermodynamic aspects in describing the crystal growth kinetics, providing a substantial step towards a more sophisticated theory of crystal growth.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2017

Shrinking of Rapidly Evaporating Water Microdroplets Reveals their Extreme Supercooling

The fast evaporative cooling of micrometer-sized water droplets in vacuum offers the appealing possibility to investigate supercooled water - below the melting point but still a liquid - at temperatures far beyond the state-of-the-art. However, it is challenging to obtain a reliable value of the droplet temperature under such extreme experimental conditions. Here, the observation of morphology-dependent resonances in the Raman scattering from a stream of perfectly uniform water droplets has allowed us to measure with an absolute precision of better than 0.2% the variation in droplet size resulting from evaporative mass losses. This finding proved crucial to an unambiguous determination of the droplet temperature. In particular, a fraction of water droplets with initial diameter of 6379$\pm$12 nm were found to remain liquid down to 230.6$\pm$0.6 K. Our results question temperature estimates reported recently for larger supercooled water droplets, and provide valuable information on the hydrogen-bond network in liquid water in the hard-to-access deeply supercooled regime.

cond-mat.other↗

arXiv2015

Observation of the Efimov state of the helium trimer

Quantum theory dictates that upon weakening the two-body interaction in a three-body system, an infinite number of three-body bound states of a huge spatial extent emerge just before these three-body states become unbound. Three helium atoms have been predicted to form a molecular system that manifests this peculiarity under natural conditions without artificial tuning of the attraction between particles by an external field. Here we report experimental observation of this long predicted but experimentally elusive Efimov state of $^{4}$He$_{3}$ by means of Coulomb explosion imaging. We show spatial images of an Efimov state, confirming the predicted size and a typical structure where two atoms are close to each other while the third is far away.

physics.atm-clus↗

arXiv2014

Observation of crystallization slowdown in supercooled para-hydrogen and ortho-deuterium quantum liquid mixtures

We report a quantitative experimental study of the crystallization kinetics of supercooled quantum liquid mixtures of para-hydrogen (pH$_2$) and ortho-deuterium (oD$_2$) by high spatial resolution Raman spectroscopy of liquid microjets. We show that in a wide range of compositions the crystallization rate of the isotopic mixtures is significantly reduced with respect to that of the pure substances. To clarify this behavior we have performed path-integral simulations of the non-equilibrium pH$_2$-oD$_2$ liquid mixtures, revealing that differences in quantum delocalization between the two isotopic species translate into different effective particle sizes. Our results provide first experimental evidence for crystallization slowdown of quantum origin, offering a benchmark for theoretical studies of quantum behavior in supercooled liquids.

cond-mat.other↗

arXiv2002

The van der Waals Potential between Metastable Atoms and Solid Surfaces: Novel Diffraction Experiments versus Theory

Highly polarizable metastable He* ($\mathrm{2^3S}$) and Ne* ($\mathrm{2^3P}$) atoms have been diffracted from a 100 nm period silicon nitride transmission grating and the van der Waals coefficients $C_3$ for the interaction of the excited atoms with the silicon nitride surface have been determined from the diffraction intensities out to the 10th order. The results agree with calculations based on the non-retarded Lifshitz formula.

quant-ph↗