title: Phase diagram of hard snowman-shaped particles.
abstract: We present the phase diagram of hard snowman-shaped particles calculated using Monte Carlo simulations and free energy calculations. The snowman particles consist of two hard spheres rigidly attached at their surfaces. We find a rich phase behavior with isotropic, plastic crystal, and aperiodic crystal phases. The crystalline phases found to be stable for a given sphere diameter ratio correspond mostly to the close packed structures predicted for equimolar binary hard-sphere mixtures of the same diameter ratio. However, our results also show several crystal-crystal phase transitions, with structures with a higher degree of degeneracy found to be stable at lower densities, while those with the best packing are found to be stable at higher densities.
authors.affiliation: Soft Condensed Matter, Debye Institute for Nanomaterials Science, Utrecht University, Princetonplein 5, 3584 CC Utrecht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dennison
authors.forename: Kristina
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Milinković
authors.forename: Marjolein
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dijkstra