Document Type
Article
Date
7-13-2007
Language
English
Disciplines
Physics
Description/Abstract
Finding the ground states of identical particles packed on spheres has relevance for stabilizing emulsions and a venerable history in the literature of theoretical physics and mathematics. Theory and experiment have confirmed that defects such as disclinations and dislocations are an intrinsic part of the ground state. Here we discuss the remarkable behavior of vacancies and interstitials in spherical crystals. The strain fields of isolated disclinations forced in by the spherical topology literally rip interstitials and vacancies apart, typically into dislocation fragments that combine with the disclinations to create small grain boundary scars. The fractionation is often into three charge-neutral dislocations, although dislocation pairs can be created as well. We use a powerful, freely available computer program to explore interstitial fractionalization in some detail, for a variety of power law pair potentials. We investigate the dependence on initial conditions and the final state energies, and compare the position dependence of interstitial energies with the predictions of continuum elastic theory on the sphere. The theory predicts that, before fragmentation, interstitials are repelled from 5-fold disclinations and vacancies are attracted. We also use vacancies and interstitials to study low energy states in the vicinity of "magic numbers" that accommodate regular icosadeltahedral tessellations.
Recommended Citation
Bowick, Mark; Nelson, David R.; and Shin, Homin, "Interstitial Fractionalization and Spherical Crystallography" (2007). Physics - All Scholarship. 145.
https://surface.syr.edu/phy/145
Source
Harvested from Arxiv.org
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Additional Information
21 pages, 9 figures More information at http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1909