Absence of a trapping effect on the kinetic critical radius in nucleation and growth processes
This is my take on an
issue brought up by Erdélyi et al.,
Acta Mat. 58, 5639 (2010), who claimed that the critical nucleus size, which is conventionally modelled only in terms of thermodynamic quantities, can vary by orders of magnitude because of dynamical effects. I show that their results cannot be reproduced by simulating exactly the same system, and that the trapping effect, which they invoke to explain their results, both contradicts thermodynamics and is impossible to happen in the simulated model, as it would violate detailed balance.
The article has been
published in
Acta Mat., volume
60, 6779 (2012). I am allowed to make the final version after peer review available
here, note that the copyright on the text is held by Elsevier.
