8th Liquid Matter Conference September 6-10, 2011 Wien, Austria ...

Wed 711:10-14:00P5.81Nucleation line of short-range square well fluidsFelipe Jimenez, 1 Gerardo Odriozola, 1 and Pedro Orea 11 Instituto Mexicano del Petroleo, Lazaro Cardenas No. 152, 07730, Mexico City,MexicoThe metastable vapor-liquid coexistence of short-range attractive fluids hinders the formation ofcrystal nuclei, which in turn makes difficult the progress of the system towards its vapor-solidground state. Recently (Chem. Phys. Lett. 501, 466, (2011)) we showed that crystal growth canbe assisted by imposing temperature fluctuations by means of the replica exchange Monte Carloalgorithm. That is, crystalization can be induced by allowing the interchange of configurationsbetween two microstates at sufficiently close teperatures, provided that the microstates are belowcertain nucleation temperature, T * n. Hence, in some cases it is obtained nearly a fcc monocrystal,in contrast with the extreme polycrystalline structure obtained without temperature fluctuations.Here, we carry out a systematic study of the crystal formation in terms of the attractive range ofthe square well potential. The obtained results point out a non-linear relationship between thenucleation temperature and the attractive range of the square well potential. This is particularlyrelevant for the crystallization of globular proteins.81