Homogeneous Nucleation: What I Understand, What I Somewhat Understand, What I do not Understand

More than one century ago Gibbs laid some of the foundation of our present understanding of nucleation. Since then there has been some progress. We now have a kinetic scheme which I think is valid for all fluid systems which are sufficiently dilute, when we know the kinetics of the individual steps in the process. For such systems the nucleation process can be described as the series of kinetic steps which cause the formation of clusters which are sufficiently large that their probability to grow is larger than their probability to become smaller. For lowdensity gasses, Maxwell and others have provided us with equations for the collision rates of molecules. These we can use to tell us the accretion rate of molecules by the clusters. For somewhat higher-density gasses, Boltzmann’s equation, combined with Enskog’s approximate solution of his equation, tells us how to calculate the needed collision rates.

Keywords Homogeneous nucleation