The understanding of metal nucleation on graphene is essential for promising future applications, especially of magnetic metals which can be used in spintronics or computer storage media. A common method to study the grown morphology is to measure the nucleated island density n as a function of growth parameters. Surprisingly, the growth of Fe on graphene is found to be unusual because it does ...

The solidification of gamma TiAl alloys is of interest to the aerospace and automotive industries. A gamma TiAl multicomponent alloy: Ti–45.5Al–4.7Nb–0.2C–0.2B (at. %) has been the focus of a study to investigate the solidification conditions that led to a Columnar to Equiaxed Transition (CET) in a directional solidification experiment where traditional Bridgman solidification was combined in s...

Zinc was electrodeposited from an acidic sulphate solution on commercial steel sheet substrates galvanostatically at 10, 20, and 100 mA/cm2. The steel substrates had an average roughness number of 1.34 microns and a high percentage of its grains had their (111) planes parallel to the plate surface. During electrodeposition at 10 mA/cm2, on some specimens, there was an intense potential fluctuat...

The process of nucleation of vapor bubbles from a superheated liquid and of liquid droplets from a supersaturated vapor is investigated using the modified-core van der Waals model density functional theory [J. F. Lutsko, J. Chem. Phys. 128, 184711 (2008)]. A novel approach is developed whereby nucleation is viewed as a transition from a metastable state to a stable state via the minimum free en...

The crystallization process from a solution begins with nucleation, which determines the structure and size of the resulting crystals. Further understanding of multi-pathway crystallizations from solution through two-step nucleation mechanisms is needed. This study uses density functional theory to probe the thermodynamic properties of alumina clusters at high temperature and reveals the thermo...

Heterogeneous nucleation is often the precursor to crystallization in solution-processed organic semiconductor thin films. Here, we study the efficacy of a series of nine small-molecule organic semiconductor additives in seeding the crystallization of solution-processable triethylsilylethynyl anthradithiophene (TES ADT). By systematically varying the concentrations of the additives in TES ADT t...

Clathrate hydrates are crystalline structures composed of small guest molecules trapped into cages formed by hydrogen-bonded water molecules. In hydrate nucleation, water and the guest molecules may stay in a metastable fluid mixture for a long period. Metastability is broken if the concentration of the guest is above certain limit. We perform molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of supersaturat...

We report on gallium droplet nucleation on silicon (100) substrates with and without the presence of the native oxide. The gallium deposition is carried out under ultra-high vacuum conditions at temperatures between 580 and 630 °C. The total droplet volume, obtained from a fit to the diameter-density relation, is used for sample analysis on clean silicon surfaces. Through a variation of the 2D ...