Related papers: Nucleation barriers in tetrahedral liquids spannin…
Crystallization from a supercooled liquid initially proceeds via the formation of a small solid embryo (nucleus), which requires surmounting an activation barrier. This phenomenon is most easily studied by numerical simulation, using…
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…
The crystallisation of entangled polymers from their melt is investigated using computer simulation with a coarse-grained model. Using hybrid Monte Carlo simulations enables us to probe the behaviour of long polymer chains. We identify…
Kinetic barriers cause polymers to crystallize incompletely, into nanoscale lamellae interleaved with amorphous regions. As a result, crystalline polymers are full of crystal-melt interfaces, which dominate their physical properties. The…
We present in this letter a model of glass formation using energy barriers and a crystal nucleation process. We then analyze the corresponding dynamical equation in the vicinity of the stationary solutions. The occurence of a pure amorphous…
Advanced phase-field techniques have been applied to address various aspects of polycrystalline solidification including different modes of crystal nucleation. The height of the nucleation barrier has been determined by solving the…
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…
Monte Carlo simulations of crystal nuclei coexisting with the fluid phase in thermal equilibrium in finite volumes are presented and analyzed, for fluid densities from dense melts to the vapor. Generalizing the lever-rule for two-phase…
Crystallization is one of the most important phase transformations of first order. In the case of metals and alloys, the liquid phase is the parent phase of materials production. The conditions of the crystallization process control the…
Crystallization of supersaturated liquids usually starts by heterogeneous nucleation. Mounting evidence shows that even homogeneous nucleation in simple liquids takes place in two steps; first a dense amorphous precursor forms, and the…
The phase diagram of model anisotropic particles with four attractive patches in a tetrahedral arrangement has been computed at two different values for the range of the potential, with the aim of investigating the conditions under which a…
The crystal nucleation from liquid in most cases is too rare to be accessed within the limited timescales of the conventional molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. Here, we developed a "persistent embryo" method to facilitate crystal…
Nucleation is an activated process in which the system has to overcome a free energy barrier in order for a first-order phase transition between the metastable and the stable phases to take place. In the liquid-to-solid transition the…
The nucleation of crystals in liquids is one of nature's most ubiquitous phenomena, playing an important role in areas such as climate change and the production of drugs. As the early stages of nucleation involve exceedingly small time and…
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})…
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…
The nucleation of a droplet of stable cylinder phase from a metastable lamellar phase is examined within the single-mode approximation to the Brazovskii model for diblock copolymer melts. By employing a variational ansatz for the droplet…
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…
The aim of this work is the development of scientifically based ways of influencing the process of nucleation of crystallization centres to control the cast structure and the properties of blanks at the casting stage. The possibility of…
We use molecular simulation to calculate the nucleation free energy barrier for the freezing of a 456 atom gold cluster over a range of temperatures. The results show that the embryo of the solid cluster grows at the vapor-surface interface…