During crystallization of glass-forming melts an important amount of stress energy may develop. The reason for this development is the difference in volume of the new system and that in the ambient phase. Therefore, the growth rate decreases with time. Here we develop an algorithm for the process of crystallization using Monte Carlo simulation techniques that takes into account the stress energy. We find that there is a short period of initial fast growth stage followed by a second period of much slower growth, controlled by the relaxation rate. This picture has also been recently observed experimentally. Additionally, we find that during the growth process the shape of the crystal is changing. Although we start from a highly symmetric crystal with flat 10 interfaces, a shape with a large number of facets is soon created.

We investigate the problem of growing clusters, which is modeled by two dimensional disks and three dimensional droplets. In this model we place a number of seeds on random locations on a lattice with an initial occupation probability, p. The seeds simultaneously grow with a constant velocity to form clusters. When two or more clusters eventually touch each other they immediately stop their growth. The probability that such a system will result in a percolating cluster depends on the density of the initially distributed seeds and the dimensionality of the system. For very low initial values of p we find a power law behavior for several properties that we investigate, namely for the size of the largest and second largest cluster, for the probability for a site to belong to the finally formed spanning cluster, and for the mean radius of the finally formed droplets. We report the values of the corresponding scaling exponents. Finally, we show that for very low initial concentration of seeds the final coverage takes a constant value which depends on the system dimensionality.

We study the percolation properties of the growing clusters model on a 2D square lattice. In this model, a number of seeds placed on random locations on the lattice are allowed to grow with a constant velocity to form clusters. When two or more clusters eventually touch each other they immediately stop their growth. The model exhibits a discontinuous transition for very low values of the seed concentration p and a second, nontrivial continuous phase transition for intermediate p values. Here we study in detail this continuous transition that separates a phase of finite clusters from a phase characterized by the presence of a giant component. Using finite size scaling and large scale Monte Carlo simulations we determine the value of the percolation threshold where the giant component first appears, and the critical exponents that characterize the transition. We find that the transition belongs to a different universality class from the standard percolation transition.

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We address the role of laser pulse fluence on expansion dynamics and size distribution of the nanoparticles produced by irradiating a metallic target with an ultrashort laser pulse in a vacuum, an issue for which contrasting indications are present in the literature. To this end, we have carried out a combined theoretical and experimental analysis of laser ablation of a bulk copper target with 50 fs, 800 nm pulses, in an interval of laser fluencies going from few to several times the ablation threshold. On one side, molecular dynamics simulations, with two-temperature model, describe the decomposition of the material through the analysis of the evolution of thermodynamic trajectories in the material phase diagram, and allow estimating the size distribution of the generated nanoaggregates. On the other side, atomic force microscopy of less than one layer nanoparticles deposits on witness plates, and fast imaging of the nanoparticles broadband optical emission provide the corresponding experimental characterization. Both experimental and numerical findings agree on a size distribution characterized by a significant fraction (90%) of small nanoparticles, and a residual part (10%) spanning over a rather large size interval, evidencing a weak dependence of the nanoparticles sizes on the laser pulse fluence. Numerical and experimental findings show a good degree of consistency, thus suggesting that modeling can realistically support the search for experimental methods leading to an improved control over the generation of nanoparticles by ultrashort laser ablation