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Updated: Jan 15, 2026

Methods of Ex Situ and In Situ Investigations of Structural Transformations: The Case of Crystallization of Metallic Glasses
Published on: June 7, 2018
The missing billions in hard sphere nucleation
Sahana Kale1, Achim Lederer2, Hans Joachim Schöpe1
1Institute for Applied Physics, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 10, 72076 Tübingen, Germany. hans-joachim.schoepe@uni-tuebingen.de.
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The crystallisation of a metastable liquid is an everyday phenomenon, yet it still presents a number of puzzles. One such puzzle is the discrepancy between the crystallisation rate observed in experiments and that predicted by theory: the experimental and simulated rate densities for hard spheres - the "simplest" system showing a first-order freezing transition - disagree by up to 22 orders of magnitude. Nevertheless, it is precisely the utilisation of elementary model systems that facilitates the resolution of these enigmas. We present a comprehensive experimental investigation into the crystallisation of colloidal hard spheres at the particle level. Our ground breaking findings challenge the prevailing conceptualisation of crystal nucleation, elucidate the discrepancy between experiment and theory, and propose an alternative description.
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