Role of Nuclearity-Dependent Properties of Small Clusters in the Nucleation Process and Thermal Hysteresis at the Phase Transition

A phenomenological approach is proposed that takes into account the nuclearity-dependent binding energy in a cluster to determine its influence on the earliest steps of the homogeneous nucleation process and to determine the limits of the metastability/supersaturation domain for the monomer-condensed phase transition. It appears that the temperature at which monomers and clusters Mn have equal Gibbs potentials increases with nuclearity n and that the transition temperatures from the monomer to the dimer and to the bulk, respectively, bracket this metastability domain.