Crystal nucleation rates in one-component Yukawa systems

B Arnold and J Daligault and D Saumon and A Bédard and SX Hu, PHYSICAL REVIEW E, 111, 025206 (2025).

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.111.025206

Nucleation in the supercooled Yukawa system is relevant for addressing current challenges in understanding a range of crystallizing systems including white dwarf (WD) stars. We use both brute force and seeded molecular dynamics simulations to study homogeneous nucleation of crystals from supercooled Yukawa liquids. With our improved approach to seeded simulations, we obtain quantitative predictions of the crystal nucleation rate and cluster size distributions as a function of temperature and screening length. These quantitative results show trends towards fast nucleation with short-ranged potentials. They also indicate that for temperatures T > 0.9T(m), where T-m is the melt temperature, classical homogeneous nucleation is too slow to initiate crystallization but transient clusters of similar to 100 particles should be common. We apply these general results to a typical WD model and obtain a delay of similar to 0.6 Gyr in the onset of crystallization that may be observable.

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