A cloak of liquidity

摘要

Droplets of a liquid alloy on a silicon surface can rearrange the surface atoms so that they mimic the short-range ordering of atoms in the alloy. Remarkably, this effect inhibits freezing of the droplets.rnPromoting freezing in a liquid is conceptually straightforward - you simply need to add suitable templates. The templates can be either 'seeds' of the crystalline phase that would form from the liquid, or small crystals of another material whose atomic-level surface structure in some way matches that of such seeds.