Nucleation and phase transition of decagonal quasicrystals

Abstract

In this work, we study the nucleation of quasicrystals from liquid or periodic crystals by developing an efficient order-order phase transition algorithm, namely the nullspace-preserving saddle search method. Specifically, we focus on nucleation and phase transitions of the decagonal quasicrystal (DQC) based on the Lifshitz-Petrich model. We present the nucleation path of DQC from the liquid and demonstrate one- and two-stage transition paths between DQC and periodic crystals. We provide a perspective of the group-subgroup phase transition and nucleation rates to understand the nucleation and phase transition mechanisms involving DQC. These results reveal the one-step and stepwise modes of symmetry breaking or recovery in the phase transition from DQC, where the stepwise modes are more probable.