Fractional size dependence of surface tension of a growing nucleus with an inhomogeneous interface

TL;DR

This study develops a Ginzburg-Landau model to analyze how the surface tension of a growing nucleus depends on size and metastable phases, revealing a universal fractional dependence and saturation behavior relevant to glass transition theories.

Contribution

It introduces an order parameter based approach that explicitly accounts for metastable phases, elucidating the fractional size dependence of surface energy in nucleation processes.

Findings

Fractional surface energy dependence is universal and arises from free energy minimization.

Surface tension saturates to a finite value independent of size.

Results support and extend RFOT theory of glasses.

Abstract

The surface energy of the nucleus of a stable phase growing in the presence of several amorphous metastable phases of character intermediate between the initial and the final phases may depend non-trivially on the size of the nucleus. This size dependence is being increasingly used to explain diverse non-equilibrium phase selection, and relaxation, as in the random first-order transition (RFOT) theory of glasses. Here we develop an order parameter based Ginzburg-Landau approach that explicitly includes the rugged free energy landscape due to the metastable phases. The fractional dependence of total surface energy between melt and stable solid phase on the number of metastable phases($N_{MS}$) has been interrogated in this study. We have also analyzed how this fractional dependence gets modified with temperature. We find that the fractional size dependence of surface energy is omnipresent, arises from the minimization of free energy and demands certain ordering of metastable phases in the interface. Our results could recover the celebrated result of Villain that forms the basis of RFOT theory of glasses. We find the additional result that the surface tension saturates to a finite size independent value.