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Updated: Jun 29, 2026

Atomic Scale Structural Studies of Macromolecular Assemblies by Solid-state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy
Published on: September 17, 2017
Morphology of critical nuclei in solid-state phase transformations
Lei Zhang1, Long-Qing Chen, Qiang Du
1Department of Mathematics, Penn State University, Pennsylvania 16802, USA. zhang_l@math.psu.edu
Abstract:
Predicting the shape of a critical nucleus in solids has been a long-standing problem in solid-state phase transformations. We show that a diffuse-interface approach together with a minimax algorithm is able to predict the critical nucleus morphology in elastically anisotropic solids without a priori assumptions. We demonstrate the possibility of nonconvex surfaces for critical nuclei. It is found that strong elastic energy contributions may lead to critical nuclei whose point group symmetry is below the crystalline symmetries of both the new and the parent phases.
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