Do supercooled liquids freeze by spinodal decomposition?
Two questions are addressed in this paper: Is it likely that spinodals occur in the freezing of one-component liquids at degrees of supercooling as moderate as TT(melt)=0.6, and are the ramified solidlike structural fluctuations seen in simulations of supercooled liquids the tell-tale harbingers of spinodal decomposition? It has been suggested in several papers that in the freezing of argonlike systems, a spinodal can be expected to be encountered at TT(melt) of approximately 0.6 or even at a shallower degree of supercooling. Heuristic evidence, particularly that found in molecular dynamics simulations in the system of selenium hexafluoride, a substance with properties similar in several respects to those of argon, suggests that a spinodal does not occur at supercoolings even considerably deeper than TT(melt)=0.6. Reinforcing this conclusion are arguments based on nucleation kinetics in the Appendix. It has been found that many of the very thin, ramified solidlike fluctuations encounte
