Adiabatic nucleation in glasses, polymers and liquid metals

Abstract

Successful application of the isothermal (classical) nucleation theory depends critically on the choice of interfacial tension, which usually cannot be determined independently. Use of Tolman correction, for interfacial tension dependence on radius, may change the nucleation frequency by a factor of 10 59 when the reduced interface tension parameter is modified by a factor of less than 0.5. Similar results can also be obtained by proposing empirical temperature dependencies of the interfacial tension. The parameters used must be chosen individually for each material. In contrast to this, the adiabatic nucleation theory shows it is in agreement with experimental results with a fixed set of parameters, as r = 3 δ, where r is the radius of the nucleus and δ is Tolman's parameter which is estimated to be about half of the intermolecular distance.