Cluster sizes in direct and indirect molecular dynamics simulations of nucleation.

We performed molecular dynamics simulations of a Lennard-Jones fluid, and compared the sizes of critical clusters in direct simulations of a nucleation event in vapor phase with the sizes of clusters in stable equilibrium with the surrounding vapor. By applying different cluster criteria it is shown that both the critical clusters and the equilibrium clusters have dense cores of similar size but the critical clusters have more outlying cluster atoms surrounding this core. The cluster definition introduced by ten Wolde and Frenkel [J. Chem. Phys. 109, 9901 (1998)], where each cluster atom must have at least five neighboring atoms within the distance of 1.5 times the Lennard-Jones length parameter, agrees well with the cluster size obtained from classical nucleation theory, and we find this agreement to be independent of temperature. The cluster size obtained from the observed nucleation rates by the first nucleation theorem is larger than the classical estimate and much smaller than the size given by the density profile of the equilibrium cluster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]