The avoidance of water freezing is the holy grail in the cryopreservation of biological samples, food, and organs. Fast cooling rates are used to beat ice nucleation and avoid cell damage. This strategy can be enhanced by applying high pressures to decrease the nucleation rate, but the physics behind this procedure has not been fully understood yet. We perform computer experiments to investigate ice nucleation at high pressures consisting in embedding ice seeds in supercooled water. We find that the slowing down of the nucleation rate is mainly due to an increase of the ice I-water interfacial free energy with pressure. Our work also clarifies the molecular mechanism of ice nucleation for a wide pressure range. This study is not only relevant to cryopreservation, but also to water amorphization and climate change modeling.

Simulations are widely used to study nucleation in first order phase transitions due to the fact that they have access to the relevant length and time scales. However, simulations face the problem that nucleation is an activated process. Therefore, rare event simulation techniques are needed to promote the formation of the critical nucleus. The Seeding method, where the simulations are started with the nucleus already formed, has proven quite useful in efficiently providing estimates of the nucleation rate for a wide range of orders of magnitude. So far, Seeding has been employed in the NPT ensemble, where the nucleus either grows or redissolves. Thus, several trajectories have to be run in order to find the thermodynamic conditions that make the seeded nucleus critical. Moreover, the nucleus lifetime is short and the statistics for obtaining its properties is consequently poor. To deal with these shortcomings we extend the Seeding method to the NV T ensemble. We focus on the problem of bubble nucleation in a metastable Lennard Jones fluid. We show that, in the NV T ensemble, it is possible to equilibrate and stabilise critical bubbles for a long time. The nucleation rate inferred from NV T-Seeding is fully consistent with that coming from NPT-Seeding. The former is quite suitable to obtain the nucleation rate along isotherms, whereas the latter is preferable if the dependence of the rate with temperature at constant pressure is required. Care should be taken with finite size effects when using NV T-Seeding. Further work is required to extend NV T seeding to other sorts of phase transitions.

We investigate vapor homogeneous nucleation in a superheated Lennard Jones liquid with computer simulations. Special simulation techniques are required to address this study since the nucleation of a critical vapor bubble -one that has equal chance to grow or shrink-in a moderately superheated liquid is a rare event. We use the Seeding method, that combines Classical Nucleation Theory with computer simulations of a liquid containing a vapor bubble to provide bubble nucleation rates in a wide temperature range. Seeding has been successfully applied to investigate the nucleation of crystals in supercooled fluids and here we apply it for the fist time -to the best of our knowledge-to the liquid-to-vapor transition. We find that Seeding provides nucleation rates that are consistent with independent calculations not based on the assumptions of Classical Nucleation Theory. Different criteria to determine the radius of the critical bubble give different rate values. The accuracy of each criterion depends of the degree of superheating. Moreover, Seeding simulations show that the surface tension depends on pressure for a given temperature. Therefore, using Classical Nucleation Theory with the coexistence surface tension does not provide good estimates of the nucleation rate.

No abstract

By means of molecular dynamics we analyse several aspects of the avalanche-mediated mechanism for glass crystallization recently reported for hard sphere glasses (Sanz et al 2014 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. 111 75). To investigate the role of inter-particle interaction softness on the devitrification path we use a continuous version of the hard-sphere potential: the pseudo-hard sphere potential (Jover et al 2012 J. Chem. Phys. 137 144505). We observe the same crystallization mechanism as in hard spheres. However, pseudo-hard sphere glasses crystallise earlier for a given density because the development of avalanches is eased by the small degree of overlapping allowed. We analyse the impact of density on the devitrification mechanism. When increasing the density, the avalanche mechanism becomes more evident and crystallisation is retarded due to a decrease of the avalanche emergence likelihood. To conclude, the observed avalanche-mediated mechanism and its density dependence do not substantially change with the employed simulation ensemble (constant volume versus constant pressure).