Thermodynamics and kinetics of crystallisation in deeply supercooled Stillinger-Weber silicon

TL;DR

This study uses computer simulations to analyze the thermodynamics and kinetics of crystallization in deeply supercooled silicon, revealing well-defined free energy barriers and clarifying the nature of metastability near a proposed liquid-liquid phase transition.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive computational analysis of crystallization barriers in supercooled silicon, clarifying the role of metastability and phase transitions.

Findings

Confirmed the existence of a free energy barrier to crystallization.

Demonstrated agreement between umbrella sampling and mean first passage time methods.

Showed that liquids near the proposed LLPT do not spontaneously crystallize.

Abstract

We study the kinetics of crystallization in deeply supercooled liquid silicon employing computer simulations and the Stillinger-Weber three body potential. The free energy barriers to crystallisation are computed using umbrella sampling Monte Carlo simulations, and for selected low temperature and zero pressure state points, using unconstrained molecular dynamics simulations to reconstruct the free energy from a mean first passage time formulation. We focus on state points that have been described in earlier work [Sastry and Angell, Nature Mater., 2, 739, 2003] as straddling a first order liquid-liquid phase transition (LLPT) between two metastable liquid states. It was argued subsequently [Ricci et al., Mol. Phys., 117, 3254, 2019] that the apparent phase transition is in fact due the loss of metastability of the liquid state with respect to the globally stable crystalline state. The presence or absence of a barrier to crystallization for these state points is therefore of importance to ascertain, with due attention to ambiguities that may arise from the choice of order parameters. We discuss our choice of order parameters and also our choice of methods to calculate the free energy at deep supercooling. We find a well-defined free energy barrier to crystallisation and demonstrate that both umbrella sampling and mean first passage time methods yield results that agree quantitatively. Our results thus provide strong evidence against the possibility that the liquids at state points close to the reported LLPT exhibit slow, spontaneous crystallisation, but they do not address the existence of a LLPT (or lack thereof). We also compute the free energy barriers to crystallisation at other state points over a broad range of temperatures and pressures, and discuss the effect of changes in the microscopic structure of the metastable liquid on the free energy barrier heights.