Computer simulation of nucleation in a gas-saturated liquid

Molecular dynamics methods have been used to investigate the kinetics of the liquid-gas phase transition in a two-component Lennard-Jones system at negative pressures and elastic stretches of the liquid to values close to spinodal ones. The molecular dynamics system consists of 2048 interacting particles with parameters of the Lennard-Jones potential for argon and neon. Density dependences of pressure and internal energy have been calculated for stable and metastable states of the mixture at a temperature T-*approximate to 0.7 +/- 0.01 and three values of the concentration. The location of mechanical and the diffusion spinodals has been determined. It has been established that a gas-saturated mixture retains its stability against finite variations of state variables up to stretches close to the values near the diffusion spinodal. The statistic laws of the process of destruction of the metastable state have been investigated. The lifetimes of the metastable phase have been determined. It is shown that owing to the small height of the potential barrier that separates the microheterogeneous from the homogeneous state a system of finite size has a possibility to make the reverse transition from the microheterogeneous into the homogeneous state. The lifetimes of the system in the microheterogeneous state, as well as the expectation times of the occurrence of a critical nucleus, are described by Poissonian distributions. (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics.