Revealing the role of liquid preordering in crystallisation of supercooled liquids

Yuan-Chao Hu and Hajime Tanaka ()
Additional contact information
Yuan-Chao Hu: University of Tokyo
Hajime Tanaka: University of Tokyo

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-12

Abstract: Abstract The recent discovery of non-classical crystal nucleation pathways has revealed the role of fluctuations in the liquid structural order, not considered in classical nucleation theory. On the other hand, classical crystal growth theory states that crystal growth is independent of interfacial energy, but this is questionable. Here we elucidate the role of liquid structural ordering in crystal nucleation and growth using computer simulations of supercooled liquids. We find that suppressing the crystal-like structural order in the supercooled liquid through a new order-killing strategy can reduce the crystallisation rate by several orders of magnitude. This indicates that crystal-like liquid preordering and the associated interfacial energy reduction play an essential role in nucleation and growth processes, forcing critical modifications of the classical crystal growth theory. Furthermore, we evaluate the importance of this additional factor for different types of liquids. These findings shed new light on the fundamental understanding of crystal growth kinetics.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-32241-z Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-32241-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-32241-z

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().