Related papers: Metastability limit for the nucleation of NaCl cry…
The growth of crystals confined in porous or cellular materials is ubiquitous in Nature and industry. Confinement affects the formation of biominerals in living organisms, of minerals in the Earth's crust and of salt crystals damaging…
A widely spread method of crystal preparation is to precipitate it from a supersaturated solution. In such a process, control of solution concentration is of paramount importance. Nucleation process, polymorph selection, and crystal habits…
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…
In this work, we use large-scale molecular dynamics simulations coupled to free energy calculations to identify for the first time a limit of stability (spinodal) and a change in the nucleation mechanism in aqueous NaCl solutions. This is a…
Designing and fabricating self-assembled open colloidal crystals have become one major direction in soft matter community because of many promising applications associated with open colloidal crystals. However, most of the self-assembled…
Structure and superfluid response of nanoscale size helium-four clusters enclosed in spherical cavities are studied by computer simulations. The curved surface causes the formation of well-defined concentric shells, thus imparting to the…
Crystal growth and crystal coalescence processes in supercooled systems strongly depend on the concentration of crystallization centers. We perform atomistic dynamics simulations of the crystallization process in the ultrathin metallic film…
NaCl crystal nucleation from metastable solutions has long been considered to occur according to a single-step mechanism. Recent experimental observations suggest that NaCl crystals emerge from disordered intermediates which is seemingly at…
Growing crystals form a cavity when placed against a wall. The birth of the cavity is observed both by optical microscopy of sodium chlorate crystals (NaClO$_3$) growing in the vicinity of a glass surface, and in simulations with a thin…
We study the conditions under which and how an imposed cluster of fixed colloidal particles at prescribed positions triggers crystal nucleation from a metastable colloidal fluid. Dynamical density functional theory of freezing and Brownian…
We study the nucleation of crystalline cluster phases in the generalized exponential model with exponent n=4. Due to the finite value of this pair potential for zero separation, at high densities the system forms cluster crystals with…
Our understanding of the growth of crystals is dominated by the classical description according to which individual atoms or molecules, driven by supersaturation, add to crystal facets. As a result, the growth of hard matter is still mostly…
The ground state of a two-dimensional, harmonically confined mesoscopic assembly of up to thirty polar molecules is studied by computer simulations. As the strength of the confining trap is increased, clusters evolve from superfluid, to…
We investigated the nucleation process at the molecular level. Controlled sticking of individual atoms onto mass selected clusters over a wide mass range has been carried out for the first time. We measured the absolute unimolecular…
The behavior of saturated aqueous sodium chloride solutions under a constant external electric field (E) was studied by molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. Our dynamic MD simulations have indicated that the irreversible nucleation process…
The microscopic mechanisms involved in the formation/dissociation of methane hydrate confined at the nanometer scale are unraveled using advanced molecular modeling techniques combined with a mesoscale thermodynamic approach. By means of…
Nucleation, the birth of a stable cluster from disorder, is inherently stochastic. Yet up to date, there are no quantitative studies on NaCl nucleation that accounts for its stochastic nature. Here, we report the first stochastic treatment…
We report on the modeling of the formation of a cavity at the surface of crystals confined by a flat wall during growth in solution. Using a continuum thin film model, we discuss two phenomena that could be observed when decreasing the…
Understanding the mechanism of nucleation of the stable phase inside the metastable parent phase during a first order phase transition has been a subject of outstanding interest in natural science. The problem becomes even more challenging…
Nucleation and growth of solids from solutions impacts many natural processes and are fundamental to applications in materials engineering and medicine. For a crystalline solid, the nucleus is a nanoscale cluster of ordered atoms, which…