2007/05/14 by Eduardo Mendez-Villuendas Ivan Saika-Voivod Richard K. Bowles, Bowles, Eduardo Mendez-Villuendas Ivan Saika-Voivod Richard K.
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #FOS: Physical sciences #Material Dynamics and Properties #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.soft #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0705.2051
5 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2007/05/14 · openalex publication_date 2007/05/14 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We examine the metastable liquid phase of a supercooled gold nanocluster by studying the free energy landscape using the largest solid-like embryo as an order parameter. Just below freezing, the free energy exhibits a local minimum at small embryo sizes and a maximum at larger embryo sizes which denotes the critical embryo size. At T=660K the free energy becomes a monotonically decreasing function of the order parameter as the liquid phase becomes unstable, indicating we have reached a spinodal. In contrast to the usual mean-field theory predictions, the size of the critical embryo remains finite as the spinodal is approached. We also calculate the rate of nucleation, independently from our free energy calculations, and observe a rapid increase in its temperature dependence when the free energy barrier is in the order of kT. This supports the idea that freezing becomes a barrierless process around the spinodal temperature.