Universality in diffusion-controlled nucleation and growth

Abstract

Nucleation and growth are studied in a system that undergoes diffusion-controlled condensation under gradual changes in parameters, such as cooling. It is demonstrated that when the Gibbs–Thompson effect becomes negligible, the system falls into a universal regime. i.e., the final droplet size distribution remains invariant under certain rescaling of system parameters. An approximate yet very accurate analytic form is obtained for the final droplet size distribution in this regime.