Related papers: Homogeneous nucleation near a second phase transit…

Homogeneous nucleation of a new phase near a second, continuous, transition, is considered. The continuous transition is in the metastable region associated with the first-order phase transition, one of whose coexisting phases is…

Phase transformations such as freezing typically start with heterogeneous nucleation. Heterogeneous nucleation near a wetting transition, of a crystalline phase is studied. The wetting transition occurs at or near a vapour-liquid transition…

Homogeneous nucleation of a new phase near an Ising-like critical point of another phase transition is studied. A scaling analysis shows that the free energy barrier to nucleation contains a singular term with the same scaling as the order…

Homogeneous nucleation, a textbook transition path for phase transitions, is typically understood on thermodynamic grounds through the prism of classical nucleation theory. However, recent studies have suggested the applicability of…

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…

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…

In simulations of the 2D Ising model, we examine heterogeneous nucleation induced by a small impurity consisting of a line of $l$ fixed spins. As $l$ increases, we identify a limit of stability beyond which the metastable phase is not…

We consider the problem of heterogeneous nucleation and growth. The system is described by a phase field model in which the temperature is included through thermal noise. We show that this phase field approach is suitable to describe…

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…

Heterogeneous nucleation is studied by Monte Carlo simulations and phenomenological theory, using the two-dimensional lattice gas model with suitable boundary fields. A chemical inhomogeneity of length b at one boundary favors the liquid…

An analytical model for the evolution of the boundary of the new phase in transformations ruled by nucleation and growth is presented. Both homogeneous and heterogeneous nucleation have been considered: The former includes transformations…

The dynamics of phase transitions plays a crucial r\^ole in the so-called interface between high energy particle physics and cosmology. Many of the interesting results generated during the last fifteen years or so rely on simplified…

Nucleation is the onset of a first-order phase transition by which a metastable phase transforms into a more stable one. Such a phase transition occurs when an initial system initially in equilibrium is destabilized by the change of an…

Heterogeneous nucleation of a new bulk phase on a flat substrate can be associated with the surface phase transition called wetting transition. When this bulk heterogeneous nucleation occurs on a completely-wettable flat substrate with a…

Nucleation and growth is the dominant relaxation mechanism driving first order phase transitions. In two-dimensional at systems nucleation has been applied to a wide range of problems in physics, chemistry and biology. Here we study…

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…

We introduce a general formalism to analyze nucleation phenomena in inhomogeneous media which considers the influence of the metastable phase, which is treated as a heat bath in which clusters are embedded, in the dynamics of the nucleation…

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…

Crystallization of supersaturated liquids usually starts by heterogeneous nucleation. Mounting evidence shows that even homogeneous nucleation in simple liquids takes place in two steps; first a dense amorphous precursor forms, and the…

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…