8th Liquid Matter Conference September 6-10, 2011 Wien, Austria ...

Wed 711:10-14:00P5.1792-dimensional colloidal crystal under stress and shearDorothea Wilms, 1 Peter Virnau, 1 and Kurt Binder 11 Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Staudinger Weg 9, 55128, Mainz, GermanyA two-dimensional colloidal crystal is studied under the confinement of structured and planar wallsin one direction. Introducing a misfit by placing the walls closer together leads to a structural transitionfrom n rows to (n-1) rows of crystalline particles and the development of soliton-staircases asthe left-over particles (which no longer fit into the crystalline structure if one row disappears) haveto distribute themselves in the crystal. A strong hysteresis is observed at this transition if only thestress is computed. Therefore, we have applied a recently developed method to compute absolutefree energies of disordered structures in order to investigate this transition in more detail. Thus wewere able to determine the transition point with much higher precision. We have also investigatedthe same system under shear. In this case, vacancies are created in the system and move around.We present an analysis of their trajectories.179