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Updated: May 26, 2026

Liquid-cell Transmission Electron Microscopy for Tracking Self-assembly of Nanoparticles
Published on: October 16, 2017
Non-self-averaging nucleation rate due to quenched disorder
1Department of Physics, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, UK. r.sear@surrey.ac.uk
Abstract:
We study the nucleation of a new thermodynamic phase in the presence of quenched disorder. The quenched disorder is a generic model of both impurities and disordered porous media; both are known to have large effects on nucleation. We find that the nucleation rate is non-self-averaging. This is in a simple Ising model with clusters of quenched spins. We also show that non-self-averaging behaviour is straightforward to detect in experiments, and may be rather common.
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