Related papers: Equilibrium interfacial free energies and Turnbull…
The interfacial free energy is a central quantity in crystallization from the meta-stable melt. In suspensions of charged colloidal spheres, nucleation and growth kinetics can be accurately measured from optical experiments. In previous…
Largely due to its role in nucleation and crystal-growth, the free energy of the crystal-melt interfacial free energy is an object of considerable interest across a number of scientific disciplines, especially in the materials-, colloid-…
We present a direct calculation by molecular-dynamics computer simulation of the crystal/melt interfacial free energy, $\gamma$, for a system of hard spheres of diameter $\sigma$. The calculation is performed by thermodynamic integration…
Extending to continuous potentials a cleaving wall molecular-dynamics simulation method recently developed for the hard-sphere system [Phys.Rev.Lett 85, 4751 (2000)], we calculate the crystal-melt interfacial free energies, $\gamma$, for a…
The hard sphere crystal-liquid interfacial free energy, ($\gamma_{\rm cl}$), is determined from molecular dynamics simulations using a novel thermodynamic integration (TI) scheme. The advantage of this TI scheme compared to previous methods…
This study proposes a new method for predicting the crystal-melt interfacial free energy ($\gamma$) using the Ginzburg-Landau (GL) model, enhanced by atomistic simulation data for more accurate density wave profiles. The analysis focuses on…
We present a tethered Monte Carlo simulation of the crystallization of hard spheres. Our method boosts the traditional umbrella sampling to the point of making practical the study of constrained Gibb's free energies depending on several…
We report a characterization of the relative stability and structural behavior of various micellar crystals of an athermal model of AB-diblock copolymers in solution. We adopt a previously devel- oped coarse-graining representation of the…
In this work, we study by means of simulations of hard spheres the equilibrium between a spherical solid cluster and the fluid. In the NVT ensemble we observe stable/metastable clusters of the solid phase in equilibrium with the fluid,…
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…
By employing brute-force molecular dynamics, umbrella sampling, and seeding simulations, we investigate homogeneous nucleation during melting and freezing of hard spheres. We provide insights into these opposing phase transitions from the…
We report a numerical study of the rate of crystal nucleation in a binary suspension of oppositely charged colloids. Two different crystal structures compete in the thermodynamic conditions under study. We find that the crystal phase that…
A free-energy functional for a crystal that contains both the symmetry conserved and symmetry broken parts of the direct pair correlation function is developed. The free-energy functional is used to investigate the crystallization of fluids…
The interfacial free energy between a crystal and a fluid, {\gamma} cf, is a highly relevant parameter in phenomena such as wetting or crystal nucleation and growth. Due to the difficulty of measuring {\gamma} cf experimentally, computer…
We used a thermodynamic integration scheme, which is specifically designed for disordered systems, to compute the interfacial free energy of the solid-liquid interface in the hard-sphere model. We separated the bulk contribution to the…
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 Euler-Lagrange equation of the phase-field crystal (PFC) model has been solved under appropriate boundary conditions to obtain the equilibrium free energy of the body centered cubic crystal-liquid interface for 18 orientations at…
Using fully minimized fundamental measure functionals, we investigate free energies, vacancy concentrations and density distributions for bcc, fcc and hcp hard-sphere crystals. Results are complemented by an approach due to Stillinger which…
The properties of the interface between solid and melt are key to solidification and melting, as the interfacial free energy introduces a kinetic barrier to phase transitions. This makes solidification happen below the melting temperature,…
A common approach to study nucleation rates is the estimation of free-energy barriers. This usually requires knowledge about the shape of the forming droplet, a task that becomes notoriously difficult in macromolecular setups starting with…