Liquid to solid nucleation via onion structure droplets

Abstract

We study homogeneous nucleation from a deeply quenched metastable liquid to a spatially modulated phase. We find, for a general class of density functional theories, that the universally favored nucleating droplet in dimensions $d\ge 3$ is spherically symmetric with radial modulations resembling the layers of an onion. The existence of this droplet has important implications for systems with effective long-range interactions, and potentially applies to polymers, plasmas, and metals.

References in corpus (4)

• Homogeneous and heterogeneous nucleation of Lennard-Jones liquids
• Amorphous nucleation precursor in highly nonequilibrium fluids
• Colloidal crystal growth at externally imposed nucleation clusters
• Transient Nucleation near the Mean-Field Spinodal

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• The Early Crystal Nucleation Process in Hard Spheres shows Synchronised Ordering and Densification
• Hydrodynamic theory of freezing: Nucleation and polycrystalline growth
• Crystallization: Colloidal suspense