COMPARISON OF EXPERIMENTS AND MODERN THEORIES OF CRYSTAL NUCLEATION

The temperature dependencies of the interfacial free energy gamma(T) p redicted by modern nucleation theories !density functional and phenome nological models) are confronted with temperature dependent data on cr ystal nucleation in hydrocarbons, molten metals, and oxide glasses. It is found that the semiempirical density functional approach and the p henomenological diffuse interface theory are fully consistent with the experiment. In contrast, the gamma(T) functions from the density func tional models developed primarily for densely packed crystal structure s could not be brought into agreement with the nucleation data investi gated. The possible origin of the success/failure of the theoretical a pproaches are discussed. (C) 1997 American Institute of Physics.