Transient kinetics of nucleation and crystallization: Part I. Nucleation

Abstract

Analytical results obtained for the transient kinetics of nucleation enable one to interpret N(gd,t), the accumulated number concentration of clusters at the instrumentally detectable size, gd. The new results enable one to extract kinetic and thermodynamic parameters of nucleation from experimentally measured cluster concentrations and to test nucleation theories experimentally. An approach to estimate the mean time to form the first nucleated cluster in a given sample is also presented.