Universal Nucleation Behavior of Sheared Systems

A Goswami and IS Dalal and JK Singh, PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS, 126, 195702 (2021).

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.195702

Using molecular simulations and a modified classical nucleation theory, we study the nucleation, under flow, of a variety of liquids: different water models, Lennard-Jones, and hard sphere colloids. Our approach enables us to analyze a wide range of shear rates inaccessible to brute- force simulations. Our results reveal that the variation of the nucleation rate with shear is universal. A simplified version of the theory successfully captures the nonmonotonic temperature dependence of the nucleation behavior, which is shown to originate from the violation of the Stokes-Einstein relation.

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