Title: Kinetics of the Crystalline Nuclei Growth in Glassy Systems,
Abstract: In this work, we study the crystalline nuclei growth in glassy systems
focusing primarily on the early stages of the process, at which the size of a
growing nucleus is still comparable with the critical size. On the basis of
molecular dynamics simulation results for two crystallizing glassy systems, we
evaluate the growth laws of the crystalline nuclei and the parameters of the
growth kinetics at the temperatures corresponding to deep supercoolings;
herein, the statistical treatment of the simulation results is done within the
mean-first-passage-time method. It is found for the considered systems at
different temperatures that the crystal growth laws rescaled onto the waiting
times of the critically-sized nucleus follow the unified dependence, that can
simplify significantly theoretical description of the post-nucleation growth of
crystalline nuclei. The evaluated size-dependent growth rates are characterized
by transition to the steady-state growth regime, which depends on the
temperature and occurs in the glassy systems when the size of a growing nucleus
becomes two-three times larger than a critical size. It is suggested to
consider the temperature dependencies of the crystal growth rate
characteristics by using the reduced temperature scale $\widetilde{T}$. Thus,
it is revealed that the scaled values of the crystal growth rate
characteristics (namely, the steady-state growth rate and the attachment rate
for the critically-sized nucleus) as functions of the reduced temperature
$\widetilde{T}$ for glassy systems follow the unified power-law dependencies.
This finding is supported by available simulation results; the correspondence
with the experimental data for the crystal growth rate in glassy systems at the
temperatures near the glass transition is also discussed.