[1] We have studied sulfuric acid aerosol nucleation in an atmospheric pressure reaction chamber using a 580 MeV electron beam to ionize the volume of the reaction chamber. We find a clear contribution from ion‐induced nucleation and consider this to be the first unambiguous observation of the ion‐effect on aerosol nucleation using a particle beam under conditions that resemble the Earth’s atmo...

The microscopic kinetics of ubiquitous solid-solid phase transitions remain poorly understood. Here, by using single-particle-resolution video microscopy of colloidal films of diameter-tunable microspheres, we show that transitions between square and triangular lattices occur via a two-step diffusive nucleation pathway involving liquid nuclei. The nucleation pathway is favoured over the direct ...

JCB • VOLUME 209 • NUMBER 1 • 2015 4 Dyche Mullins morphed from an electrical engineer to a cell biologist during his doctoral work at the University of Kentucky. Attending the intense Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) Physiology Course assured his transformation and earned him a postdoctoral spot with the course director at the time, Tom Pollard. During his time in Pollard’s lab, fi rst at Jo...

Crystallization is of great importance in fields as diverse as atmospheric chemistry and the pharmaceutical industry. It starts with nucleation, the formation of a microscopic crystal. Here we study, via computer simulation, the heterogeneous nucleation of a crystal in wedge-shaped grooves in a surface. We find that nucleation in these grooves is many orders of magnitude faster than on a flat s...

In this work, we developed a microfluidic equivalent of the classical droplet method for investigating nucleation kinetics. Our microfluidic device allows us to store hundreds of droplets of small volume ( approximately 100 nL) and to accurately control their temperature. We also monitor directly all the stored droplets, and thus perform statistical measurements on a large number of nucleation ...

The inconsistent temperature dependence of nucleation rates, disagreement of theoretical critical or onset supersaturations with experimental data, and insufficiently accurate predictions of nucleation rates are fundamental problems of the classical nucleation theory (CNT) of water vapors, which is a foundation of various multicomponent nucleation models widely used in the aerosol microphysics,...

A general kinetic nucleation and condensation model is proposed and implemented in the direct simulation Monte Carlo method. Both gas and clusters are treated as particles in this model, and clusters possess internal energy and potential energy. Nucleation and condensation processes are treated as collision events, and the probability for possible nucleation or condensation is determined from t...