The stabilization of tubular crystals in mixtures of spherical particles

Abstract

Novel crystal structures in binary atomic mixtures arise when the attractive well is wide enough to allow double occupancy by small particles. The resulting crystals consist of ordered packings of self assembled linear structures comprised of a cylindrical tube of large particles enclosing a close packed core of small particles that corresponds to a stacking of overlapping icosahedra. We show that the stability of these structures depends on two essential features of the spherically symmetric pairwise interactions: (i) a radius ratio between 0.414 and 0.588, and (ii) a width w of the attractive well in the interaction between unlike particles that satisfies w > σ_SS where σ_SS is the diameter of the small particle.