Related papers: Crystal nucleation of hard spheres using molecular…
We determine the nucleation rates of hard spheres using brute-force molecular dynamics simulations. We overcome nucleation barriers of up to $28 k_B T$, leading to a rigorous test of nucleation rates obtained from rare-event methods and…
In the study of crystal nucleation via computer simulations, hard spheres are arguably the most extensively explored model system. Nonetheless, even in this simple model system, the complex thermodynamics of crystal nuclei can sometimes…
Over the past two decades, a large number of studies addressed the topic of crystal nucleation in suspensions of hard spheres. The shared result of all these efforts is that, at low super-saturations, experimentally observed nucleation…
Combining three numerical methods (forward flux sampling, seeding of droplets, and finite size droplets), we probe the crystallization of hard spheres over the full range from close to coexistence to the spinodal regime. We show that all…
Using computer simulations we investigate the homogeneous crystal nucleation in suspensions of colloidal hard dumbbells. The free energy barriers are determined by Monte Carlo simulations using the umbrella sampling technique. We calculate…
We used molecular dynamics simulations and the path sampling technique known as forward flux sampling to study homogeneous nucleation of NaCl crystals from supersaturated aqueous solutions at 298 K and 1 bar. Nucleation rates were obtained…
The crystallization of a metastable melt is one of the most important non equilibrium phenomena in condensed matter physics, and hard sphere colloidal model systems have been used for several decades to investigate this process by…
We present a computer simulation study on the crystal nucleation process in suspensions of hard spheres, fully taking into account the solvent hydrodynamics. If the dynamics of collodial crystallization were purely diffusive, the crystal…
The phase field theory of crystal nucleation described in [L. Granasy, T. Borzsonyi, T. Pusztai, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 206105 (2002)] is applied for nucleation in hard--sphere liquids. The exact thermodynamics from molecular dynamics is…
We determined bulk crystal nucleation rates in aqueous suspensions of charged spheres at low metastability. Experiments were performed in dependence on electrolyte concen-tration and for two different particle number densities. The…
We study crystal nucleation of the Weeks-Chandler-Andersen (WCA) model, using the recently introduced Persistent Embryo Method (PEM). The method provides detailed characterization of pre-critical, critical and post-critical nuclei, as well…
We study the spontaneous nucleation and crystallization of linear and cyclic chains of flexibly connected hard spheres using extensive molecular dynamics simulations. To this end, we present a novel event-driven molecular dynamics…
We investigate the early part of the crystal nucleation process in the hard sphere fluid using data produced by computer simulation. We find that hexagonal order manifests continuously in the overcompressed liquid, beginning approximately…
Hard-sphere model systems are well-suited in both experiment and simulations to investigate fundamental aspects of the crystallization of fluids. In experiments on colloidal models of hard-sphere fluids, the uid is unavoidably at contact…
In this work, we introduce Variational Umbrella Seeding, a novel technique for computing nucleation barriers. This new method, a refinement of the original seeding approach, is far less sensitive to the choice of order parameter for…
Nucleation in supersaturated vapor is investigated with two series of molecular dynamics simulations in the canonical ensemble. The applied methods are: (a) analysis of critical nuclei at moderate supersaturations by simulating equilibria…
We performed molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of the nucleation of water vapor in order to test nucleation theories. Simulations were performed for a wide range of supersaturation ratios (S = 3-25) and water temperatures (Tw=300-390K).…
Heterogeneous nucleation is a process wherein extrinsic impurities facilitate freezing by lowering nucleation barriers and constitutes the dominant mechanism for crystallization in most systems. Classical nucleation theory (\textsc{Cnt})…
We calculate bubble nucleation rates in a Lennard-Jones fluid through explicit molecular dynamics simulations. Our approach -- based on a recent free energy method (dubbed reweighted Jarzynski sampling), transition state theory, and a…
The interplay between densification and positional ordering during the process of crystal nucleation is a greatly investigated topic. Even for the simplest colloidal model -- hard spheres -- there has been much debate regarding the…