Peter G. Vekilov (2010), Nanoscale 2(11), 2346 — DOI-10.1039/c0nr00628a
Key takeaways
Filed, not read. Known here by what it is standardly cited for.
- Nucleation from solution often goes in two steps. First, disordered clusters of dense liquid form. Then a crystalline nucleus forms inside one of them.
- The clusters are metastable, and the rate-limiting step is ordering within a cluster, not assembly from the solution. (Corrected from the companion reading, NOTE-708: there the clusters are long-lived relative to density fluctuations, from over 15 ms to about 10 s, with populations steady for hours. Version 1 said “short-lived”.)
- This accounts for nucleation rates far below what classical theory predicts. (In the companion reading, NOTE-708, it accounts for about nine of the ten orders of magnitude for lysozyme.)
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-11 as a possible refinement of CLAIM-176, or a challenge to it, and not attached to it. Read across, an idea recurs first as a loose cluster: the same concern in different words, before anyone sees that it is one thing. Giving it a code is the second step, ordering within the cluster. If that is right, the second occurrence is not the threshold. The threshold is the moment the cluster is recognized. A reading should say whether the two steps are separable in the physics, as that reading needs.
The companion perspective, LIT-919, was read the same day (NOTE-708). It does not cite this paper. It answers the separability question for lysozyme: the two steps separate in order parameter and in rate, but early theory separated them only near a liquid–liquid critical point, and one theory it cites has the intermediate as a mere density fluctuation. It likely carries the argument this paper was filed for; whether this paper adds anything can be settled only by reading it.