Related papers: Nucleation and crystallization process of silicon …
Combined with the principle of entropy maximum and CS state equation, the critical size for a cluster to nucleate then the critical volume fraction of a phase transition is determined in this paper, and our result is in good agreement with…
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,…
The nucleation and structure of silicon nanocrystals formed by different preparation conditions and silicon concentration (28 - 70 area %) have been studied using Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), Energy Filtered TEM (EFTEM) and…
Nucleonic matter displays a quantum liquid structure, but in some cases finite nuclei behave like molecules composed of clusters of protons and neutrons. Clustering is a recurrent feature in light nuclei, from beryllium to nickel. For…
Nucleation in the supercooled Yukawa system is relevant for addressing current challenges in understanding a range of crystallizing systems including white dwarf (WD) stars. We use both brute force and seeded molecular dynamics simulations…
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…
A novel liquid-liquid phase transition has been proposed and investigated in a wide variety of pure substances recently, including water, silica and silicon. From computer simulations using the Stillinger-Weber classical empirical…
Using a recently developed thermodynamic integration method, we compute the precise values of the excess Gibbs free energy (G^e) of the high density liquid (HDL) phase with respect to the crystalline phase at different temperatures (T) in…
Among all the freezing transitions, that of water into ice is probably the most relevant to biology, physics, geology or atmospheric science. In this work we investigate homogeneous ice nucleation by means of computer simulations. We…
We investigate the early part of the crystal nucleation process in the hard sphere fluid using data produced by computer simulation. We find that hexagonal order manifests continuously in the overcompressed liquid, beginning approximately…
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…
Transient homogeneous nucleation is studied in the limit of large critical sizes. Starting from pure monomers, three eras of transient nucleation are characterized in the classic Becker-D\"oring kinetic equations with two different models…
Neutral silicon clusters Si_n (up to n = 7) and their cations Si_n+ (up to n = 10) have been produced by femtosecond laser ablation of bulk silicon in vacuum and investigated using time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Two populations of the…
We study the ground state of a system of spinless electrons interacting through a screened Coulomb potential in a lattice ring. By using analytical arguments, we show that, when the effective interaction compares with the kinetic energy,…
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…
In this paper we have explored computationally the solidification process of large nickel clusters. This process has the characteristic features of the first order phase transition occurring in a finite system. The focus of our research is…
The existence of a phase transition between two distinct liquid phases in single-component network-forming liquids (e.g., water, silica, silicon) has elicited considerable scientific interest. The challenge, both for experiments and…
An atomic-scale model for silicate solutions is introduced for investigation of the nucleation process during zeolite synthesis in the absence of a structure directing agent. Monte Carlo schemes are developed to determine the equilibrium…
The dynamics of homogeneous nucleation and growth of crystalline nickel from the super-cooled melt is examined during rapid quenching using molecular dynamics and a modified embedded atom method potential. The character of the critical…
Studies of nucleation generally focus on the properties of the critical cluster, but the presence of defects within the crystal lattice means that the population of nuclei necessarily evolve through a distribution of pre-critical clusters…