Christopher May, Ingo Rehberg, Kai Huang
The melting process of a monolayer of wet spherical particles under horizontally swirling motion is investigated experimentally. The wetting induced cohesion via the formation of capillary bridges assembles the particles into a crystalline structure at moderate driving. As the driving frequency grows, this crystal is found to melt in two steps: Reshaping into a circular shape while keeping a locally hexagonal structure, followed by surface melting. Quantitative characterizations on local packing density and bond orientational order parameters both reveal a critical swirling frequency for the start of surface melting, which can be rationalized with a balance between the energy injection and dissipation from the rupture of single capillary bridges.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.5540
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