Solvent hydrodynamics speed up crystal nucleation in suspensions of hard spheres

TL;DR

This study uses computer simulations to show that solvent hydrodynamics significantly accelerate crystal nucleation in hard sphere suspensions, explaining previous discrepancies between experimental and simulated nucleation rates.

Contribution

It introduces a simulation approach that fully incorporates solvent hydrodynamics, revealing their role in enhancing nucleation rates beyond diffusive predictions.

Findings

Nucleation rates are higher at increased viscosities.

Hydrodynamics effects explain discrepancies between experiments and simulations.

Nucleation does not scale inversely with viscosity as purely diffusive models suggest.

Abstract

We present a computer simulation study on the crystal nucleation process in suspensions of hard spheres, fully taking into account the solvent hydrodynamics. If the dynamics of collodial crystallization were purely diffusive, the crystal nucleation rate densities would drop as the inverse of the solvent viscosity. However, we observe that the nucleation rate densities do not scale in this way, but are enhanced at high viscosities. This effect might explain the large discrepancy between the nuclation rate densities obtained by simulation and experiment that have reported in the literature so far.