Universality in diffusion-controlled nucleation and growth

Abstract

Nucleation and growth is studied in a system undergoing diffusion-controlled condensation under gradual changes in parameters, such as cooling. It is demonstrated that when Gibbs-Thompson effect becomes negligible, the system falls into a universal regime. i.e. the final droplet size distribution remains invariant under certain rescaling of system parameters. An approximate yet very accurate analytic form is obtained for the size distribution function in this regime.