Universal Nucleation Behaviour of Sheared Systems

Abstract: Using molecular simulations and a modified Classical Nucleation Theory, we study the nucleation, under flow, of a variety of liquids: different water models, Lennard-Jones and hard sphere colloids. Our approach enables us to analyze a wide range of shear rates inaccessible to brute-force simulations. Our results reveal that the variation of the nucleation rate with shear is universal. A simplified version of the theory successfully captures the non-monotonic temperature dependence of the nucleation behavior, which is shown to originate from the violation of the Stokes-Einstein relation.