Related papers: Heterogeneous critical nucleation on a completely-…
The microscopic mechanisms controlling heterogeneous ice nucleation are complex and remain poorly understood. Although good ice nucleators are generally believed to match ice lattice and to bind water, counter examples are often identified.…
We review theoretical and simulational approaches to the description of equilibrium bulk crystal and interface properties as well as to the nonequilibrium processes of homogeneous and heterogeneous crystal nucleation for the simple model…
We investigate heterogeneous and homogeneous nucleation in nearest-neighbor and long-range Ising models for various quench depths. We find that the system has a true crossover from heterogeneous to homogeneous nucleation for increasing…
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 consider the thermodynamic behavior of local fluctuations occurring in a stable or metastable bulk phase. For a system with three or more phases, a simple analysis based on classical nucleation theory predicts that small fluctuations…
Four on-lattice and six off-lattice models for active matter are studied numerically, showing that in contact with a wall, they display universal wetting transitions between three distinctive phases. The particles, which interact via…
Classical nucleation theory (CNT), linking rare nucleation events to the free energy landscape of a growing nucleus, is central to understanding phase-change kinetics in passive fluids. Nucleation in non-equilibrium systems is much harder…
We investigate critical wetting transitions for fluids adsorbed in wedge-like geometries where the substrate height varies as a power-law, $z(x,y) \sim |x| ^\gamma$, in one direction. As $\gamma$ is increased from 0 to 1, the substrate…
Materials with nanoscale phase separation are considered. A system representing a heterophase mixture of ferromagnetic and paramagnetic phases is studied. After averaging over phase configurations, a renormalized Hamiltonian is derived…
We consider fluid wetting on a corrugated substrate using effective interfacial Hamiltonian theory and show that breaking the translational invariance along the wall can induce an 'unbending' phase transition in addition to unbinding. Both…
We consider interfacial phenomena accompanying bulk quantum phase transitions in presence of surface fields. On general grounds we argue that the surface contribution to the system free energy involves a line of singularities characteristic…
Supersaturated superfluid 3He-4He liquid mixture, separating into the 3He-concentrated c-phase and 3He-diluted d-phase, represents a unique possibility for studying macroscopic quantum nucleation and quantum phase-separation kinetics in…
In the standard scenario, the electroweak phase transition is a first order phase transition which completes by the nucleation of critical bubbles. Recently, there has been speculation that the standard picture of the electroweak phase…
The thermodynamics of strongly anisotropic crystalline surfaces is analogous to that of a binary mixture exhibiting phase separation. On a metastable planar surface, formation of stable orientations requires a nucleation process, in which…
We present a computer simulation study on crystal nucleation and growth in supersaturated suspensions of mono-disperse hard spheres induced by a triangular lattice substrate. The main result is that compressed substrates are wet by the…
The scalar field theory and the scalar electrodynamics quantized in the flat gap are considered. The dynamical effects arising due to the boundary presence with two types of boundary conditions (BC) satisfied by scalar fields are studied.…
We introduce a novel method for calculating the size of the critical nucleus and the value of the surface tension in systems with first order phase transition. The method is based on classical nucleation theory, and it consists in studying…
Freezing of water is arguably one of the most common phase transitions on Earth and almost always happens heterogeneously. Despite its importance, we lack a fundamental understanding of what makes substrates efficient ice nucleators. Here…
In standard nucleation theory, the nucleation process is characterized by computing $\Delta\Omega(V)$, the reversible work required to form a cluster of volume $V$ of the stable phase inside the metastable mother phase. However, other…
We derive a theory that describes homogeneous nucleation of grain boundary (GB) phases. Our analysis takes account of the energy resulting from the GB phase junction, the line defect separating two different GB structures, which is…