Engineering topics
Vanden-Eijnden, Eric
Publications and source records attributed to Vanden-Eijnden, Eric.
Dynamic density functional theory with hydrodynamic interactions and fluctuations
We derive a closed equation for the empirical concentration of colloidal particles in the presence of both hydrodynamic and direct interactions. The ensemble average of our functional Langevin equation reproduces known deterministic Dynamic Density Functional Theory (DDFT) [M. Rex and H. Löwen, “Dynamical density functional theory with hydrodynamic interactions and colloids in unstable traps,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 101(14), 148302 (2008)], and, at the same time, it also describes the microscopic fluctuations around the mean behavior. We suggest separating the ideal (non-interacting) contribution from additional corrections due to pairwise interactions. We find that, for an incompressible fluid and in the absence of direct interactions, the mean concentration follows Fick's law just as for uncorrelated walkers. At the same time, the nature of the stochastic terms in fluctuating DDFT is shown to be distinctly different for hydrodynamically-correlated and uncorrelated walkers. This leads to striking differences in the behavior of the fluctuations around Fick's law, even in the absence of pairwise interactions. We connect our own prior work [A. Donev, T. G. Fai, and E. Vanden-Eijnden, “A reversible mesoscopic model of diffusion in liquids: from giant fluctuations to Fick's law,” J. Stat. Mech.: Theory Exp. (2014) P04004] on fluctuating hydrodynamics of diffusion in liquids to the DDFT literature, and demonstrate that the fluid cannot easily be eliminated from consideration if one wants to describe the collective diffusion in colloidal suspensions.
Order-parameter-aided temperature-accelerated sampling for the exploration of crystal polymorphism and solid-liquid phase transitions
The problem of predicting polymorphism in atomic and molecular crystals constitutes a significant challenge both experimentally and theoretically. From the theoretical viewpoint, polymorphism prediction falls into the general class of problems characterized by an underlying rough energy landscape, and consequently, free energy based enhanced sampling approaches can be brought to bear on the problem. In this paper, we build on a scheme previously introduced by two of the authors in which the lengths and angles of the supercell are targeted for enhanced sampling via temperature accelerated adiabatic free energy dynamics [T. Q. Yu and M. E. Tuckerman, Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 015701 (2011)]. Here, that framework is expanded to include general order parameters that distinguish different crystalline arrangements as target collective variables for enhanced sampling. The resulting free energy surface, being of quite high dimension, is nontrivial to reconstruct, and we discuss one particular strategy for performing the free energy analysis. The method is applied to the study of polymorphism in xenon crystals at high pressure and temperature using the Steinhardt order parameters without and with the supercell included in the set of collective variables. The expected fcc and bcc structures are obtained, and when the supercell parameters are included as collective variables, we also find several new structures, including fcc states with hcp stacking faults. We also apply the new method to the solid-liquid phase transition in copper at 1300 K using the same Steinhardt order parameters. Our method is able to melt and refreeze the system repeatedly, and the free energy profile can be obtained with high efficiency.