Dr. Ziwei Guo, who completed his PhD this spring, has a paper entitled “Competing factors in grain boundary loop shrinkage: two-dimensional hard sphere colloidal crystals” that will appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Chemical Physics.  This paper helps to resolve a minor mystery that arose from a previous study.  In earlier simulations, Ziwei found that misoriented domains within a 2-dimensional hard sphere solid would shrink most quickly when the angle of misalignment is higher; in experiments published at around the same time by researchers at Oxford University, the opposite trend was observed.  Here we found that the trend will vary depending on three factors: domain size, how densely the crystal is packed, and how the domain is formed in the first place.  You can read the full paper here: Guo-Kindt-GB-loop-JCP-accepted