Hard Sphere Crystal Nucleation Rates: Reconciliation of Simulation and Experiment.

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 supersaturations, experimentally observed nucleation rates and numerically computed ones differ by more than 10 orders of magnitude. We present precise simulation results of crystal nucleation rate densities in the metastable 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.