Hard sphere crystal nucleation rates: Reconciliation of simulation and experiment

Abstract

Over the past two decades, a large number of studies addressed the topic of crystal nucleation in suspensions of hard spheres. The shared result of all these efforts is that, at low super-saturations, experimentally observed nucleation rates and numerically computed ones differ by more than ten orders of magnitude. We present precise simulation results of crystal nucleation rate densities in the meta-stable hard sphere liquid. To compare these rate densities to experimentally measured ones, we propose an interpretation of the experimental data as a combination of nucleation and crystal growth processes (rather than purely the nucleation process). This interpretation may resolve the long standing dispute about the differing rates.

Accepted by Physical Review Letters

References in corpus (2)

• In Search of Colloidal Hard Spheres
• Non-classical pathways of crystallization in colloidal systems

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Colloidal Hard Spheres: Triumphs, Challenges and Mysteries
• Brute-force nucleation rates of hard spheres compared with rare-event methods and classical nucleation theory
• Statistical mechanics of crystal nuclei of hard spheres
• Random Close Packing of Semi-Flexible Polymers in Two Dimensions: Emergence of Local and Global Order
• Crystal Nucleation of Highly-Screened Charged Colloids