Two-stage melting transition of bilayer systems under geometrical confinement: multicolour domain decomposition Monte Carlo simulation

Topological Order in an Antiferromagnetic Tetratic Phase

We study lattice melting in two-dimensional systems of spinful particles that interact antiferromagnetically. We argue that, for strong spin interactions, single lattice dislocations are forbidden by magnetic frustration. This leads to a melting scenario in which a tetratic phase, containing free dislocation pairs and bound disclinations, separates the solid from the liquid. We demonstrate this phase numerically in a system of hard spheres confined between parallel plates, where spins are represented by the heights of the spheres. In the tetratic phase, the spins are shown to be as antiferromagnetically ordered as allowed by their spatial configuration.

Semi-supervised learning for the study of structural formation in colloidal systems via image recognition

The analysis of the structural formation of colloidal systems using machine learning techniques has recently attracted much attention. In many of these studies, local bond-order parameters (LBOPs) were employed as descriptors, where such LBOPs are suitable mainly for the detection of crystal structures. On the other hand, image-based convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are quite effective in detecting not only crystals but also random structures, and the author demonstrated their efficiency in a previous paper. However, in supervised learning, it is difficult to obtain a correct result when there is an unexpected new phase that was unknown when training the CNN. In this paper, we propose a hybrid scheme that consists of supervised and unsupervised learning techniques, employing two different approaches: image-based CNN and generalized LBOP. The proposed method was applied to two-dimensional colloidal systems, and its efficiency was demonstrated.