Related papers: Heterogeneous ice nucleation controlled by the cou…
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…
Soft materials with layered structure such as membranes, block copolymers, and smectics exhibit intriguing morphologies with nontrivial curvatures. We report on restructuring the Gaussian and mean curvatures of smectic A films with free…
As one of the most fascinating confined water/ice phenomena, two-dimensional square ice has been extensively studied and experimentally confirmed in recent years. Apart from the unidirectional homogeneous square icing patterns considered in…
Ice-templating is a well-established processing route for porous ceramics. Because of the structure/properties relationships, it is essential to better understand and control the solidification microstructures. Ice-templating is based on…
We present a study the initial stages of ice growth on pristine and oxygen-functionalized highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (O-HOPG), combining low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy (LT-STM) and machine-learning structural…
Recent first-principle calculations unveiled a distinctive dynamic behavior in water molecule rotation during the melting process of highly confined water, indicating a notable time-scale separation in diffusion. In this short paper, we…
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…
Targeting specific technological applications requires the control of nanoparticle properties, especially the crystalline polymorph. Freezing a nanodroplet deposited on a solid substrate leads to the formation of crystalline structures. We…
It is proposed that the rapid observed homogeneous nucleation of ice dust in a cold, weakly-ionized plasma depends on the formation of hydroxide (OH$^-$) by fast electrons impacting water molecules. These OH$^{-}$ ions attract neutral water…
Ice nucleation and growth are critical in many fields, including atmospheric science, cryobiology, and aviation. However, understanding the detailed mechanisms of ice crystal growth remains challenging. In this work, crystallization at the…
In principle, the answer to the posed titular question is undoubtedly 'yes.' But in practice, requisite reference data for homogeneous systems have been obtained with a treatment of intermolecular interactions that is different from that…
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 freezing of colloidal suspensions is encountered in many natural and engineering processes. It can be harnessed through a process known as ice templating, to produce porous materials and composites exhibiting unique functional…
Experimental investigations of hydrophobic/water interfaces often return controversial results, possibly due to the unknown role of gas accumulation at the interfaces. Here, during advanced atomic force microscopy of the initial evolution…
We study a microscopically realistic model of a physical gel and use computer simulations to investigate its static and dynamic properties at thermal equilibrium. The phase diagram comprises a sol phase, a coexistence region ending at a…
We propose an approximation for the total ice nucleation rate J=J(T,R) in supercooled water droplets as a function of both droplet radius R and temperature T, taking account of both volume-based and surface-stimulated nucleation modes. Its…
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…
One of the most ubiquitous and technologically important phenomena in nature is the nucleation of homogeneous flowing systems. The microscopic effects of shear on a nucleating system are still imperfectly understood, although in recent…
Dynamical density functional simulations reveal structural aspects of crystal nucleation in undercooled liquids: the first appearing solid is amorphous, which promotes the nucleation of bcc crystals, but suppresses the appearance of the fcc…
We introduce a microscopically realistic model of a physical gel and use computer simulations to study its static and dynamic properties at thermal equilibrium. The phase diagram comprises a sol phase, a coexistence region ending at a…