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Updated: May 28, 2026

An Analog Macroscopic Technique for Studying Molecular Hydrodynamic Processes in Dense Gases and Liquids
Published on: December 4, 2017
Communication: A dynamical theory of homogeneous nucleation for colloids and macromolecules
1Center for Nonlinear Phenomena and Complex Systems, Code Postal 231, Université Libre de Bruxelles,Blvd. du Triomphe, 1050 Brussels, Belgium. jlutsko@ulb.ac.be
Abstract:
Homogeneous nucleation is formulated within the context of fluctuating hydrodynamics. It is shown that for a colloidal system in the strong damping limit the most likely path for nucleation can be determined by gradient descent in density space governed by a nontrivial metric. This is illustrated by application to low-density/high-density liquid transition of globular proteins in solution where it is shown that nucleation process involves two stages: the formation of an extended region with enhanced density followed by the formation of a cluster within this region.
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