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 super-saturations, experimentally observed nucleation rates and numerically computed ones differ by more than ten orders of magnitude. We present precise simulation results of crystal nucleation rate densities in the meta-stable 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.