Dynamics of a monodisperse Lennard-Jones system on a sphere

Abstract

We investigate by Molecular Dynamics simulation a system of $N$ particles moving on the surface of a two-dimensional sphere and interacting by a Lennard-Jones potential. We detail the way to account for the changes brought by a nonzero curvature, both at a methodological and at a physical level. When compared to a two-dimensional Lennard-Jones liquid on the Euclidean plane, where a phase transition to an ordered hexagonal phase takes place, we find that the presence of excess defects imposed by the topology of the sphere frustrates the hexagonal order. We observe at high density a rapid increase of the relaxation time when the temperature is decreased, whereas in the same range of temperature the pair correlation function of the system evolves only moderately.

10 oages, 5 figures

References in corpus (3)

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• Fractionalization of Interstitials in Curved Colloidal Crystals
• Tuning the fragility of a glassforming liquid by curving space

Cited by in corpus (10)

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• Nucleation on a sphere: the roles of curvature, confinement and ensemble
• Static properties of quasi-confined hard-sphere fluids
• Order by disorder: saving collective motion from topological defects in a conservative model
• Avoided criticality and slow relaxation in frustrated two dimensional models
• A symplectic integrator for molecular dynamics on a hypersphere