Direct simulations of homogeneous bubble nucleation: Agreement with classical nucleation theory and no local hot spots

Abstract

We present results from direct, large-scale molecular dynamics simulations of homogeneous bubble (liquid-to-vapor) nucleation. The simulations contain half a billion Lennard-Jones atoms and cover up to 56 million time steps. The unprecedented size of the simulated volumes allows us to resolve the nucleation and growth of many bubbles per run in simple direct micro-canonical simulations while the ambient pressure and temperature remain almost perfectly constant. We find bubble nucleation rates which are lower than in most of the previo Show more