The instability of Alexander-McTague crystals and its implication for nucleation

Abstract

We show that the argument of Alexander and McTague, that the bcc crystalline structure is favored in those crystallization processes where the first order character is not too pronounced, is not correct. We find that any solution that satisfies the Alexander-McTague condition is not stable. We investigate the implication of this result for nucleation near the pseudo- spinodal in near-meanfield systems.

20 pages, 0 figures, submitted to Physical Review E

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Polymorphism, crystal nucleation and growth in the phase-field crystal model in 2d and 3d
• Homogeneous and heterogeneous nucleation of Lennard-Jones liquids
• Phase-field crystal modelling of crystal nucleation, heteroepitaxy and patterning
• Heterogeneous nucleation of/on nanoparticles: a density functional study using the phase-field crystal model
• The structure of fluctuations near mean-field critical points and spinodals and its implication for physical processes
• Non-clasical Nucleation in Supercooled Nickel
• Micellar Crystals in Solution from Molecular Dynamics Simulations
• Simulations of Spinodal Nucleation in Systems with Elastic Interactions
• Liquid to solid nucleation via onion structure droplets
• Instability of the Body-Centered Cubic Lattice within the Sticky Hard Sphere and Lennard-Jones Model obtained from Exact Lattice Summations