Crystallization in suspensions of hard spheres: a Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulation study

The crystallization of a metastable melt is one of the most important non-equilibrium phenomena in condensed matter physics, and hard sphere colloidal model systems have been used for several decades to investigate this process by experimental observation and computer simulation. Nevertheless, there is still an unexplained discrepancy between the simulation data and experimental nucleation rate densities. In this paper we examine the nucleation process in hard spheres using molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulation. We show that the crystallization process is mediated by precursors of low orientational bond-order and that our simulation data fairly match the experimental data sets.