We examine the role of charge, structural, and spin degrees of freedom in the previously poorly understood phase transition in the 5d1 transition-metal double perovskite Cs2TaCl6 using a combination of computational and experimental techniques. Our heat ca ...
Barocaloric (BC) materials provide cheaper and more energy efficient alternatives to traditional refrigerants. Some liquid alkanes were recently shown to exhibit a colossal BC effect, matching the entropy changes in commercial vapour-liquid refrigerants. D ...
Carbon nanostructures formed through physical synthesis come in a variety of sizes and shapes. With the end goal of rationalizing synthetic pathways of carbon nanostructures as a function of tunable parameters in the synthesis, we investigate how the initi ...
Heterogeneous ice nucleation impacts the hydrological cycle and climate through affecting cloud microphysical state and radiative properties. Despite decades of research, a quantitative description and understanding of heterogeneous ice nucleation remains ...
We use numerical bootstrap techniques to study correlation functions of traceless sym-metric tensors of O(N) with two indices ti j. We obtain upper bounds on operator dimen-sions for all the relevant representations and several values of N. We discover sev ...
The atomic motion controls important properties of materials, such as thermal transport, phase transitions, and vibrational spectra. However, simulating the ionic dynamics is exceptionally challenging when quantum fluctuations are relevant (e.g., at low te ...
This thesis is motivated by recent experiments on systems described by extensions of the one-dimensional transverse-field Ising (TFI) model where (1) finite-size properties of Ising-ordered phases -- specifically, ground state level crossings -- were obser ...
Using the corner-transfer matrix renormalization group to contract the tensor network that describes its partition function, we investigate the nature of the phase transitions of the hard-square model, one of the exactly solved models of statistical physic ...
The connectedness percolation threshold (phi(c)) for spherically symmetric, randomly distributed fractal aggregates is investigated as a function of the fractal dimension (d(F)) of the aggregates through a mean-field approach. A pair of aggregates (each of ...
In this thesis, we study systems of active particles interacting via generic torques of different nature. We analyze the phase behavior of these systems, which results from the interplay between self-propulsion, excluded-volume and torques.
We tackle the p ...