Related papers: Heterogeneous nucleation on a completely wettable …
One of most intriguing problems of heterogeneous crystal nucleation in droplets is its strong enhancement in the contact mode (when the foreign particle is presumably in some kind of contact with the droplet surface) compared to the…
Bubble nucleation at catalyst surfaces plays a critical role in the operation of electrolyzers. However, achieving controlled bubble nucleation remains challenging due to limited understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Here, we present…
Using the 2D Ising model we study the generic properties of nucleation in hydrophobic nanopores. To explore the pathways to nucleation of a spin-up phase from a metastable spin-down phase we perform umbrella sampling and transition path…
The prevalence of heterogeneous nucleation in nature was explained qualitatively by the classical theory for heterogeneous nucleation established over more than 60 years ago, but the quantitative validity and the key conclusions of the…
A system with a metastable phase and a pseudo continuous set of the heterogeneous centers is considered. An analytical theory for kinetics of the process of condensation in such a system is constructed. The free energy of formation of the…
Despite its importance in atmospheric science, much remains unknown about the microscopic mechanism of heterogeneous ice nucleation. In this work, we perform hybrid Monte Carlo simulations of the heterogeneous nucleation of ice on a range…
Water at negative pressures can remain in a metastable state for a surprisingly long time before it reaches equilibrium by cavitation, i.e. by the formation of vapor bubbles. The wide spread of experimentally measured cavitation pressures…
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…
Despite its relevance in biology and engineering, the molecular mechanism driving cavitation in water remains unknown. Using computer simulations, we investigate the structure and dynamics of vapor bubbles emerging from metastable water at…
Wetting of liquid droplets on passive surfaces is ubiquitous in our daily lives, and the governing physical laws are well-understood. When surfaces become active, however, the governing laws of wetting remain elusive. Here we propose…
The paper presents a theoretical approach to the description of the relativistic scattering of a massive (neutral) lepton on a nucleus, in which the latter retains its integrity. The measurable cross section of this process includes the…
We report simulations on the homogeneous liquid-fcc nucleation of charged colloids for both low and high contact energy values. As a precursor for crystal formation, we observe increased local order at the position where the crystal will…
We study wetting droplets formed of active Brownian particles in contact with a repulsive potential barrier, in a wedge geometry. Our numerical results demonstrate a transition between partially wet and completely wet states, as a function…
Heterogeneous nucleation is central to many familiar first-order phase transitions such as the freezing of water and the solidification of metals, and it can also play a crucial role in cosmology. We examine nucleation seeded by preexisting…
Motivated by recent experiments, we consider theoretically the compression of droplets pinned at the bottom on a surface of finite area. We show that if the droplet is sufficiently compressed at the top by a surface, it will always develop…
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…
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 process of homogeneous crystal nucleation has been considered in a model liquid, where the interparticle interaction is described by a short-range spherical oscillatory potential. Mechanisms of initiating structural ordering in the…
We consider the effect of nucleation on a one-dimensional stepped surface, finding that step-flow growth is metastable for any strength of the additional step-edge barrier. The surface is made unstable by the formation of a critical…
The well-known classical nucleation theory (CNT) for the free energy barrier towards formation of a nucleus of critical size of the new stable phase within the parent metastable phase fails to take into account the influence of other…