In search of a precursor for crystal nucleation of hard and charged colloids
arXiv:2306.05886 · doi:10.1063/5.0161356
Abstract
The interplay between crystal nucleation and the structure of the metastable fluid has been a topic of significant debate over recent years. In particular, it has been suggested that even in simple model systems such as hard or charged colloids, crystal nucleation might be foreshadowed by significant fluctuations in local structure around the location where the first nucleus arises. We investigate this using computer simulations of spontaneous nucleation events in both hard and charged colloidal particles. To detect local structural variations, we use both standard and unsupervised machine learning methods capable of finding hidden structures in the metastable fluid phase. We track numerous nucleation events for the face-centered cubic and body-centered cubic crystal on a local level, and demonstrate that all signs of crystallinity emerge simultaneously from the very start of the nucleation process. We thus conclude that there is no precursor for the nucleation of charged colloids.
References in corpus (8)
- Accurate determination of crystal structures based on averaged local bond order parameters
- Crystal Nucleation in Liquids: Open Questions and Future Challenges in Molecular Dynamics Simulations
- Autonomously revealing hidden local structures in supercooled liquids
- Crystal nucleation as the ordering of multiple order parameters
- Assessing the structural heterogeneity of supercooled liquids through community inference
- Dimensionality reduction of local structure in glassy binary mixtures
- Kinetic phase diagram for nucleation and growth of competing crystal polymorphs in charged colloidal suspensions
- Crystal Nucleation of Highly-Screened Charged Colloids