Minisymposium Presentation

Colloidal suspensions confined to emulsion droplets are model systems for understanding crystallization processes and for developing functional materials. They are also an ideal playground for advanced particle simulations and statistical sampling. This presentation focuses on strategies to model such processes in high-performance computing environments using physics-based simulations. Our main tools are event-driven molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulation of hard spheres and hard polyhedra. Structure formation is affected by the interplay of thermodynamic and kinetic effects. I will discuss strategies to sample phase space efficiently as required for free-energy calculations, which are a prerequisite to predict phase behavior. Our simulations explain the mesoscale structures in certain minerals, are realized in experiment of clusters with structural color, and explain the self-assembly of certain nanocrystals.