Interfacial Free Energy as the Key to the Pressure-Induced Deceleration of Ice Nucleation

Abstract

The avoidance of water freezing is the holy grail in the cryopreservation of biological samples, food, and organs. Fast cooling rates are used to beat ice nucleation and avoid cell damage. This strategy can be enhanced by applying high pressures to decrease the nucleation rate, but the physics behind this procedure has not been fully understood yet. We perform computer experiments to investigate ice nucleation at high pressures consisting in embedding ice seeds in supercooled water. We find that the slowing down of the nucleation rate is mainly due to an increase of the ice I-water interfacial free energy with pressure. Our work also clarifies the molecular mechanism of ice nucleation for a wide pressure range. This study is not only relevant to cryopreservation, but also to water amorphization and climate change modeling.

6 pages and 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Crystal Nucleation in Liquids: Open Questions and Future Challenges in Molecular Dynamics Simulations
• Homogeneous ice nucleation evaluated for several water models
• The mold integration method for the calculation of the crystal-fluid interfacial free energy from simulations
• Suppression of Sub-surface Freezing in Free-Standing Thin Films of a Coarse-grained Model of Water

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Homogeneous nucleation of ice
• Seeding Approach to nucleation in the NVT ensemble: the case of bubble cavitation in overstretched Lennard Jones fluids
• Anomalous Behavior in the Nucleation of Ice at Negative Pressures
• Interfacial free energy and Tolman length of curved liquid-solid interfaces from equilibrium studies
• Homogeneous Ice Nucleation Rate in Water Droplets
• The kinetics of the ice-water interface from ab initio machine learning simulations
• Classical Nucleation Theory for the Crystallization Kinetics in Sheared Liquids
• Equivalence between condensation and boiling in a Lennard Jones fluid
• Seeding Approach to Bubble Nucleation in Superheated Lennard Jones Fluids
• Effect of pressure on the carbon dioxide hydrate-water interfacial free energy along its dissociation line
• Rotationally invariant local bond order parameters for accurate determination of hydrate structures
• Can molecular simulations reliably compare homogeneous and heterogeneous ice nucleation?