Hard sphere crystal nucleation rates: Reconciliation of simulation and experiment

TL;DR

This paper presents precise simulation results for hard sphere crystal nucleation rates and proposes an interpretation of experimental data as a combination of nucleation and growth, aiming to reconcile the longstanding discrepancy between simulation and experiment.

Contribution

It introduces a new interpretation of experimental data and provides accurate simulation results to bridge the gap with experimental nucleation rates.

Findings

Simulation results match experimental data when considering combined nucleation and growth processes.

Proposed interpretation explains the discrepancy over ten orders of magnitude.

Reconciliation of simulation and experimental nucleation rates in hard sphere systems.

Abstract

Over the past two decades, a large number of studies addressed the topic of crystal nucleation in suspensions of hard spheres. The shared result of all these efforts is that, at low super-saturations, experimentally observed nucleation rates and numerically computed ones differ by more than ten orders of magnitude. We present precise simulation results of crystal nucleation rate densities in the meta-stable hard sphere liquid. To compare these rate densities to experimentally measured ones, we propose an interpretation of the experimental data as a combination of nucleation and crystal growth processes (rather than purely the nucleation process). This interpretation may resolve the long standing dispute about the differing rates.