Related papers: Ostwald's Rule of Stages in One-Dimension
We have only rules of thumb with which to predict how a material will crystallize, chief among which is Ostwald's rule of stages. It states that the first phase to appear upon transformation of a parent phase is the one closest to it in…
The crystallisation of carbon from the melt under extreme conditions is highly relevant to earth and planetary science, materials manufacturing, and nuclear fusion research. The thermodynamic conditions near the graphite-diamond-liquid…
In many systems, nucleation of a stable solid may occur in the presence of other (often more than one) metastable phases. These may be polymorphic solids or even liquid phases. In such cases, nucleation of the solid phase from the melt may…
Phase transitions into a new phase that is itself metastable are common; instead of the equilibrium phase nucleating a metastable phase does so. When this occurs the system is sometimes said to be obeying Ostwald's rule. We show how this…
We introduce a simple nearest-neighbor spin model with multiple metastable phases, the number and decay pathways of which are explicitly controlled by the parameters of the system. With this model we can construct, for example, a system…
Understanding how multi-component liquid mixtures undergo phase separation is central to elucidating biophysical organization in the cell. Here, combining analytical and numerical results, we characterise the dynamics of mixtures with…
Homogeneous nucleation of the new phase of one transition near a second phase transition is considered. The system has two phase transitions, we study the nucleation of the new phase of one of these transitions under conditions such that we…
In 1897 Ostwald formulated his step rule for formation of the most stable crystal state for a system with crystal polymorphism. The rule describes the irreversible way a system converts to the crystal with lowest free energy. But in fact…
In this paper, we use the cell dynamics method to study the dynamics of phase transformation when three phases exist. The system we study is a two-dimensional system. The system is able to achieve three phases coexistence, which for…
Despite the common expectation that conjugated organic molecules on metals tend to adsorb in a flat-lying wetting layer, several recent studies have found strong indications for coverage-dependent transitions to upright-standing phases,…
We consider the thermodynamic behavior of local fluctuations occurring in a stable or metastable bulk phase. For a system with three or more phases, a simple analysis based on classical nucleation theory predicts that small fluctuations…
We investigate the dynamical evolution of a thermodynamically unstable crystal surface into a hill-and-valley structure. We demonstrate that, for quasi one-dimensional ordering, the equation of motion maps exactly to the modified…
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 ostwald ripening of bubbles is studied by molecular dynamics simulations involving up to 679 million Lennard-Jones particles. Many bubbles appear after depressurizing a system that is initially maintained in the pure-liquid phase, and…
Gibbs' phase rule states that two-phase coexistence of a single-component system, characterized by an n-dimensional parameter-space, may occur in an n-1-dimensional region. For example, the two equilibrium phases of the Ising model coexist…
Simple classical thermodynamic approach to the general description of metastable states is presented. It makes possible to calculate the explicit dependence of the Gibbs free energy on temperature, to calculate the heat capacity, the…
The phase separation mechanism of a binary liquid mixture off-critically quenched in its miscibility gap is nucleation and growth, its homogeneous phase reaching a metastable equilibrium state. The successive stages of growth of the…
The addition of enough non-adsorbing polymer to an otherwise stable colloidal suspension gives rise to a variety of phase behavior and kinetic arrest due to the depletion attraction induced between the colloids by the polymers. We report a…
Metastable phases may be spontaneously formed from other metastable phases through nucleation. Here we demonstrate the spontaneous formation of a metastable phase from an unstable equilibrium by spinodal decomposition, which leads to a…
We present theory and simulation of simultaneous chemical demixing and phase ordering in a polymer-liquid crystal mixture in conditions where isotropic-isotropic phase separation is metastable with respect to isotropic-nematic phase…