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Effect of Gravity on Crystal Nucleation in Colloidal Hard Spheres
- Supervisor:Prof. dr. Daniel Bonn
- Research Team: Stefania Ketzetzi Msc.
- Goal: To investigate the origin of the 12 orders of magnitude difference between the nucleation rates measured in experiments and the rates predicted by simulations in the low liquid-crystal coexistence regime.
- Info: D.Bonn, S.Ketzetzi
Homogeneous crystal nucleation from a metastable hard-sphere (HS) colloidal liquid has been extensively studied in simulations and experiments. A huge discrepancy between the simulated and experimental nucleation rate is observed, stretching up to 12 orders of magnitude for particle volume fraction φ=0.52. It was recently shown in a simulation study that a gravitational field is capable of enhancing the nucleation rate up to values reported previously in experiments, indicating gravity as a promising mechanism to explain the discrepancy. We address this issue in an experimental study of crystal nucleation as a function of the volume fraction in suspensions of hard-sphere colloids under the influence of sedimentation by means of confocal microscopy, studying both crystallinity and density on a local scale, at the single particle level.