Point Defects in Crystals of Charged Colloids
arXiv:2104.03033 · doi:10.1063/5.0047034
Abstract
Charged colloidal particles - both on the nano and micron scales - have been instrumental in enhancing our understanding of both atomic and colloidal crystals. These systems can be straightforwardly realized in the lab, and tuned to self-assemble into body-centered cubic (BCC) and face-centered cubic (FCC) crystals. While these crystals will always exhibit a finite number of point defects, including vacancies and interstitials - which can dramatically impact their material properties - their existence is usually ignored in scientific studies. Here, we use computer simulations and free-energy calculations to characterize vacancies and interstitials in both FCC and BCC crystals of point-Yukawa particles. We show that, in the BCC phase, defects are surprisingly more common than in the FCC phase, and the interstitials manifest as so-called crowdions: an exotic one-dimensional defect proposed to exist in atomic BCC crystals. Our results open the door to directly observing these elusive defects in the lab.
arXiv comment8 pages, 4 figures
References in corpus (11)
- Vacancy-stabilized crystalline order in hard cubes
- Re-entrant melting and freezing in a model system of charged colloids
- Measuring nonlinear stresses generated by defects in 3D colloidal crystals
- Large effect of polydispersity on defect concentrations in colloidal crystals
- Phase diagrams of colloidal spheres with a constant zeta-potential
- Strongly Non-Arrhenius Self-Interstitial Diffusion in Vanadium
- Measuring Colloidal Forces from Particle Position Deviations inside an Optical Trap
- Triple junction at the triple point resolved on the individual particle level
- Anomalous dynamics of interstitial dopants in soft crystals
- Strain Fields in Repulsive Colloidal Crystals
- Phase and vacancy behaviour of hard "slanted" cubes