Nucleation in binary polymer blends: Effects of foreign mesoscopic spherical particles

We study nucleation in binary polymer blends in the presence of mesoscopic spherical particles using self-consistent field theory, considering both heterogeneous and homogeneous nucleation mechanisms. Heterogeneous nucleation is found to be highly sensitive to surface selectivity and particle size, with rather subtle dependence on the particle size. Particles that preferentially adsorb the nucleating species generally favor heterogeneous nucleation. For sufficiently strong adsorption, barrierless nucleation is possible. By comparing the free energy barrier for homogeneous and heterogeneous nucleation, we construct a kinetic phase diagram

Ternary nucleation of H_2SO_4, NH_3 and H_2O

A classical theory of the ternary homogeneous nucleation of sulfuric acid—ammonia—water is presented. For NH3 mixing ratios exceeding 1 ppt, the presence of ammonia enhances the binary (sulfuric acid—water) nucleation rate by several orders of magnitude. However, the limiting component for ternary nucleation—as for binary nucleation—is sulfuric acid. The sulfuric acid concentration needed for significant ternary nucleation is several orders of magnitude below that required in binary case

Observation of inhomogeneous domain nucleation in epitaxial Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 capacitors

We investigated domain nucleation process in epitaxial Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 capacitors under a modified piezoresponse force microscope. We obtained domain evolution images during polarization switching process and observed that domain nucleation occurs at particular sites. This inhomogeneous nucleation process should play an important role in an early stage of switching and under a high electric field. We found that the number of nuclei is linearly proportional to log(switching time), suggesting a broad distribution of activation energies for nucleation. The nucleation sites for a positive bias differ from those for a negative bias, indicating that most nucleation sites are located at ferroelectric/electrode interfaces

Observing classical nucleation theory at work by monitoring phase transitions with molecular precision.

It is widely accepted that many phase transitions do not follow nucleation pathways as envisaged by the classical nucleation theory. Many substances can traverse intermediate states before arriving at the stable phase. The apparent ubiquity of multi-step nucleation has made the inverse question relevant: does multistep nucleation always dominate single-step pathways? Here we provide an explicit example of the classical nucleation mechanism for a system known to exhibit the characteristics of multi-step nucleation. Molecular resolution atomic force microscopy imaging of the two-dimensional nucleation of the protein glucose isomerase demonstrates that the interior of subcritical clusters is in the same state as the crystalline bulk phase. Our data show that despite having all the characteristics typically associated with rich phase behaviour, glucose isomerase 2D crystals are formed classically. These observations illustrate the resurfacing importance of the classical nucleation theory by re-validating some of the key assumptions that have been recently questioned

Nucleation in Systems with Elastic Forces

Systems with long-range interactions when quenced into a metastable state near the pseudo-spinodal exhibit nucleation processes that are quite different from the classical nucleation seen near the coexistence curve. In systems with long-range elastic forces the description of the nucleation process can be quite subtle due to the presence of bulk/interface elastic compatibility constraints. We analyze the nucleation process in a simple 2d model with elastic forces and show that the nucleation process generates critical droplets with a different structure than the stable phase. This has implications for nucleation in many crystal-crystal transitions and the structure of the final state

The uphill turtle race: on short time nucleation probabilities

The short time behavior of nucleation probabilities is studied by representing nucleation as diffusion in a potential well with escape over a barrier. If initially all growing nuclei start at the bottom of the well, the first nucleation time on average is larger than the inverse nucleation frequency. Explicit expressions are obtained for the short time probability of first nucleation. For very short times these become independent of the shape of the potential well. They agree well with numerical results from an exact enumeration scheme. For a large number N of growing nuclei the average first nucleation time scales as 1/\log N in contrast to the long-time nucleation frequency, which scales as 1/N. For linear potential wells closed form expressions are obtained for all times.Comment: 8 pages, submitted to J. Stat. Phy