Nonequilibrium Phase Transitions in Repulsive Binary Mixtures

Pedro Antonio Santos-Flórez, Maurice de Koning

Published 2020-02-26Version 1

We consider nonequilibrium phase transitions in classical binary mixtures described by a set of different purely repulsive pair interaction potentials during which an infinite-temperature homogeneous initial phase is instantaneously quenched to zero temperature. It is found that such systems display two kinds of second-order nonequilibrium transition, corresponding to either a conserved or non-conserved order parameter. The type can be controlled by tuning the interactions between unlike particles, with strong inter-species repulsion leading to unmixing, and weak repulsion giving rise to a continuous crystallization process that is barrier-less and produces scale-invariant crystal grain-size distributions. Furthermore, the behavior of the potential-energy function in the neighborhood of zero separation is directly related to the propensity of the continuous ordering transition.