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We report water cluster formation in the uniform postnozzle flow of a Laval nozzle at low temperatures of 87.0 and 47.5 K and high supersaturations of lnS ∼ 41 and 104, respectively. Cluster size distributions were measured after soft single-photon ionization at 13.8 eV with mass spectrometry. Critical cluster sizes were determined from cluster size distributions recorded as a function of increasing supersaturation, resulting in critical sizes of 6-15 and 1, respectively. Comparison with previous data for propane and toluene reveals a systematic trend in the nucleation behavior, i.e., a change from a steplike increase to a gradual increase of the maximum cluster size with increasing supersaturation. Experimental nucleation rates of 5 · 1015 cm−3 s−1 and 2 · 1015 cm−3 s−1 for lnS ∼ 41 and 104, respectively, were retrieved from cluster size distributions recorded as a function of nucleation time. These lie 2-3 orders of magnitude below the gas kinetic collision limit assuming unit sticking probability, but they agree very well with a recent prediction by a master equation model based on ab initio transition state theory. The experimental observations are consistent with barrierless growth at 47.5 K, but they hint at a more complex nucleation behavior for the measurement at 87.0 K. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present results from large-scale molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of homogeneous vapor-to-liquid nucleation. The simulations contain between 1 × 109 and 8 × 109 Lennard-Jones (LJ) atoms, covering up to 1.2 μs (56 × 106 time-steps). They cover a wide range of supersaturation ratios, S ≃ 1.55-104, and temperatures from kT = 0.3 to 1.0[variant_greek_epsilon] (where [variant_greek_epsilon] is the depth of the LJ potential, and k is the Boltzmann constant). We have resolved nucleation rates as low as 1017 cm-3 s-1 (in the argon system), and critical cluster sizes as large as 100 atoms. Recent argon nucleation experiments probe nucleation rates in an overlapping range, making the first direct comparison between laboratory experiments and molecular dynamics simulations possible: We find very good agreement within the uncertainties, which are mainly due to the extrapolations of argon and LJ saturation curves to very low temperatures. The self-consistent, modified classical nucleation model of Girshick and Chiu [J. Chem. Phys. 93, 1273 (1990)] underestimates the nucleation rates by up to 9 orders of magnitudes at low temperatures, and at kT = 1.0[variant_greek_epsilon] it overestimates them by up to 105. The predictions from a semi-phenomenological model by Laaksonen et al. [Phys. Rev. E 49, 5517 (1994)] are much closer to our MD results, but still differ by factors of up to 104 in some cases. At low temperatures, the classical theory predicts critical clusters sizes, which match the simulation results (using the first nucleation theorem) quite well, while the semi-phenomenological model slightly underestimates them. At kT = 1.0[variant_greek_epsilon], the critical sizes from both models are clearly too small. In our simulations the growth rates per encounter, which are often taken to be unity in nucleation models, lie in a range from 0.05 to 0.24. We devise a new, empirical nucleation model based on free energy functions derived from subcritical cluster abundances, and find that it performs well in estimating nucleation rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical analysis of several statements concerning experimental studies, molecular dynamics simulations, and the theoretical interpretation of bubble nucleation processes is performed. In particular, it is shown that the Tolman equation does not supply us, in general, with a satisfactory theoretically founded description of the curvature dependence of the surface tension and the dependence of the steady-state nucleation rate of bubbles and droplets on supersaturation in the framework of classical nucleation theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]