Probing the Free Energy of Small Water Clusters: Revisiting Classical Nucleation Theory.

ABSTRACT: By addressing the defects in classical nucleation theory (CNT), we develop an approach for extracting the free energy of small water clusters from nucleation rate experiments without any assumptions about the form of the cluster free energy. For temperatures higher than ∼250 K, the extracted free energies from experimental data points indicate that their ratio to the free energies predicted by CNT exhibits nonmonotonic behavior as the cluster size changes. We show that this ratio increases from almost zero for monomers and passes through (at least) one maximum before approaching one for large clusters. For temperatures lower than ∼250 K, the behavior of the ratio between extracted energies and CNT's prediction changes; it increases with cluster size, but it remains below one for almost all

SUBMITTER: Afzalifar A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9442792 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature