Mike Evans and I have just published our second article together, in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s interdisciplinary journal Soft Matter. It concerns a simulation study of crystal growth in the presence of two common complicating factors: i) Polydispersity (particles are non-identical) and ii) Metastability (in addition to the crystal growth, non-equilibrium gas-liquid separation is taking place). The result is the “boiled-egg” growth mechanism, which we model with theory and simulation, and whose effects on growth depend on a subtle interplay between the two factors I just mentioned, which remains to be further explored. The work is of generic relevance to many situations, but particular examples include e.g. protein crystallisation, photonic crystal growth, colloid-polymer mixtures. There are looooooads of nice pictures in this one.

• The advance online article is here.

• A pre-print which I will shortly update with the final small changes we made before publication (freely accessible to everyone but with less pretty formatting and editing etc.) is here.

Enjoy!