Dynamics of homogeneous nucleation

Abstract

The classical nucleation theory for homogeneous nucleation is formulated as a theory for a density fluctuation in a supersaturated gas at a given temperature. But Molecular Dynamics simulations reveal that it is small cold clusters which initiates the nucleation. The temperature in the nucleating clusters fluctuate, but the mean temperature remains below the temperature in the supersaturated gas until they reach the critical nucleation size. The critical nuclei have, however, a temperature equal to the supersaturated gas. The kinetics of homogeneous nucleation is not only caused by a grow or shrink by accretion or evaporation of monomers only, but by an exponentially declining change in cluster size per time step equal to the cluster distribution in the supersaturated gas.

5 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Properties of Liquid Clusters in Large-scale Molecular Dynamics Nucleation Simulations
• Role of attractive forces in determining the equilibrium structure and dynamics of simple liquids

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Developing a self-consistent AGB wind model: II. Non-classical, non-equilibrium polymer nucleation in a chemical mixture
• Nucleation and droplet growth from supersaturated vapor at temperatures below the triple point temperature
• The role of local bond-order at crystallization in a simple supercooled liquid