Related papers: Free Energy Barriers for Crystal Nucleation from F…
A fluid in equilibrium in a finite volume $V$ with particle number $N$ at a density $\rho = N/V$ exceeding the onset density $\rho_f $ of freezing may exhibit phase coexistence between a crystalline nucleus and surrounding fluid. Using a…
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 Asakura-Oosawa model for colloid-polymer mixtures is studied by Monte Carlo simulations at densities inside the two-phase coexistence region of fluid and solid. Choosing a geometry where the system is confined between two flat walls,…
The crystallisation of entangled polymers from their melt is investigated using computer simulation with a coarse-grained model. Using hybrid Monte Carlo simulations enables us to probe the behaviour of long polymer chains. We identify…
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…
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…
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…
In this paper, we report dynamic Monte Carlo simulations of melting and crystallization in a single-chain system. Their free energy barriers are calculated by the umbrella sampling method and can be described well by a simple expression…
Recent very large molecular dynamics simulations of homogeneous nucleation with $(1-8) \cdot 10^9$ Lennard-Jones atoms [Diemand et al. J. Chem. Phys. {\bf 139}, 074309 (2013)] allow us to accurately determine the formation free energy of…
In standard nucleation theory, the nucleation process is characterized by computing $\Delta\Omega(V)$, the reversible work required to form a cluster of volume $V$ of the stable phase inside the metastable mother phase. However, other…
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…
Predicting crystal nucleation is among the most significant long--standing challenges in condensed matter. In the system most studied (hard sphere colloids), the comparison between experiments performed using static light scattering and…
The phase field theory of crystal nucleation described in [L. Granasy, T. Borzsonyi, T. Pusztai, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 206105 (2002)] is applied for nucleation in hard--sphere liquids. The exact thermodynamics from molecular dynamics is…
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.…
A melting transition for a system of hard spheres interacting by a repulsive Yukawa potential of DLVO form is studied. To find the location of the phase boundary, we propose a simple theory to calculate the free energies for the coexisting…
We study the nucleation of the liquid phase from a supersaturated vapor in two dimensions (2D). Using different Monte Carlo simulation methods, we calculate the free energy barrier for nucleation, the line tension and also investigate the…
Monte Carlo simulations at constant pressure are performed to study coexistence and interfacial properties of the liquid-solid transition in hard spheres and in colloid-polymer mixtures. The latter system is described as a one-component…
We study the nucleation of nearly-hard charged colloidal particles. We use Monte Carlo simulations in combination with free-energy calculations to accurately predict the phase diagrams of these particles and map them via the freezing…
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…
Crystallization and vitrification of tetrahedral liquids are important both from a fundamental and a technological point of view. Here, we study via extensive umbrella sampling Monte Carlo computer simulations the nucleation barriers for a…