Composition, morphology, and growth of clusters in a gas of particles with random interactions

J Chem Phys. 2018 Mar 14;148(10):104304. doi: 10.1063/1.5017165.

Abstract

We use Langevin dynamics simulations to study the growth kinetics and the steady-state properties of condensed clusters in a dilute two-dimensional system of particles that are all different (APD) in the sense that each particle is characterized by a randomly chosen interaction parameter. The growth exponents, the transition temperatures, and the steady-state properties of the clusters and of the surrounding gas phase are obtained and compared with those of one-component systems. We investigate the fractionation phenomenon, i.e., how particles of different identities are distributed between the coexisting mother (gas) and daughter (clusters) phases. We study the local organization of particles inside clusters, according to their identity-neighbourhood identity ordering (NIO)-and compare the results with those of previous studies of NIO in dense APD systems.