Dyuti Bhattacharya, Amit Ghosal
The thermal `melting' of self-formed rigid structures made of small number of interacting classical particles confined in a irregular two-dimensional (2D) space is investigated using Monte Carlo simulations. It is shown that the interplay of long-range Coulomb repulsions between these particles and the irregular confinement yields a solid-like phase at low temperatures that possesses a bond-orientation order (BOO) but the positional order is depleted down to the lowest temperatures. Upon including thermal fluctuations, this solid-like phase smoothly crosses over to a liquid-like phase by destroying the BOO. The demise of solidity is aided by the proliferation of disclinations. The behavior of different physical observables in the crossover region are obtained. Our results will help quantifying melting found in experiments on systems with confined geometries.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.4575
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