Surface induced nucleation of a Lennard-Jones system on an implicit surface at sub-freezing temperatures: a comparison with the classical nucleation theory.

The aggregation-volume-bias Monte Carlo method was employed to study surface-induced nucleation of Lennard-Jonesium on an implicit surface below the melting point. It was found that surfaces catalyze not only the formation of the droplets (where the nucleation free energy barriers were shown to decrease with increasing surface interaction strength), but also the transition of these droplets into crystal structures due to the surface-induced layering effects. However, this only occurs under suitable interaction strength. When surface attraction is too strong, crystallization is actually inhibited due to the spread of the particles across the surface and corresponding formation of two-dimensional clusters. The simulation results were also used to examine the bulk-droplet based classical nucleation theory for surface-induced nucleation, particularly the additional contact angle term used to describe both the nucleation free energy barrier heights and the critical cluster sizes compared to its homogeneous nucleation formalism. Similar to what has been found previously for homogeneous nucleation, the theory does poorly toward the high-supersaturation region when the critical clusters are small and fractal, but the theoretical predictions on both barrier heights and critical cluster sizes improve rapidly with the decrease of the supersaturation.