Related papers: Systematic Improvement of Classical Nucleation The…
In many systems, nucleation of a stable solid may occur in the presence of other (often more than one) metastable phases. These may be polymorphic solids or even liquid phases. In such cases, nucleation of the solid phase from the melt may…
Using computer simulations, we validate a simple free energy model that can be analytically solved to predict the equilibrium size of self-limiting clusters of particles in the fluid state governed by a combination of short-range attractive…
As a model for a suspension of hard-sphere like colloidal particles where small nonadsorbing dissolved polymers create a depletion attraction, we introduce an effective colloid-colloid potential closely related to the Asakura-Oosawa model…
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…
Ice nucleation is greatly important in areas as diverse as climate change, cryobiology, geology or food industry. Predicting the ability of a substrate to induce the nucleation of ice from supercooled water is a difficult problem. Here, we…
The conventional theory of homogeneous and heterogeneous nucleation in a supersaturated vapor is tested by Monte Carlo simulations of the lattice gas (Ising) model with nearest-neighbor attractive interactions on the simple cubic lattice.…
We investigate the kinetics and the free energy landscape of the crystallization of hard spheres from a supersaturated metastable liquid though direct simulations and forward flux sampling. In this first paper, we describe and test two…
The evaluation of nucleation rates from molecular dynamics trajectories is hampered by the slow nucleation time scale and impact of finite size effects. Here, we show that accurate nucleation rates can be obtained in a very general fashion…
Among all the freezing transitions, that of water into ice is probably the most relevant to biology, physics, geology or atmospheric science. In this work we investigate homogeneous ice nucleation by means of computer simulations. We…
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…
We present a partial free energy profile for the homogeneous nucleation of ice using an all-atom model of water at low supercooling, at which ice growth dynamics are reasonably accessible to simulation. We demonstrate that the free energy…
The task of a first principles theoretical calculation of the rate of gas to liquid nucleation has remained largely incomplete despite the existence of reliable results from unbiased simulation studies at large supersaturation. Although the…
Phase diagrams of some globular proteins have a fluid-fluid transition as well as a fluid-crystal transition. Homogeneous nucleation of the crystal from the fluid phase near the critical point of the fluid-fluid transition is examined. As…
In this Letter we report a simulation study in which we compare the solid-liquid interfacial free energy of NaCl at coexistence, with the value that follows from the height of the homogeneous nucleation barrier. We find that the two…
The isothermal compression of a dilute nucleonic gas invoking cluster degrees of freedom is studied in an equilibrium statistical model; this clusterized system is found to be more stable than the pure nucleonic system. The equation of…
First order phase transitions proceed via nucleation. The rate of nucleation varies exponentially with the free-energy barrier to nucleation, and so is highly sensitive to variations in this barrier. In practice, very few systems are…
Nucleation phenomena are ubiquitous in nature and the presence of impurities in every real and experimental system is unavoidable. Yet numerical studies of nucleation are nearly always conducted for entirely pure systems. We have studied…
We simulate the homogeneous nucleation of ice from supercooled liquid water at 220 K in the isobaric-isothermal ensemble using the MW monatomic water potential. Monte Carlo simulations using umbrella sampling are performed in order to…
The basic physics of nucleation in solid \hl{single-crystal} nanoparticles is revealed by a phase-field theory that includes surface energy, chemical reactions and coherency strain. In contrast to binary fluids, which form arbitrary contact…
Excess contributions to the free energy due to interfaces occur for many problems encountered in the statistical physics of condensed matter when coexistence between different phases is possible (e.g. wetting phenomena, nucleation, crystal…