A Proposed New Approach

Tolman s work (Section 3.5.2) suggests that the surface free energy of a microcluster, r, should take the form r(l + 2A/r) where A is a constant and r the radius of the particles. Kirkwood and have argued theoretically that 

Hence a plot of against should be a straight line. Briant and 

Binder and Stauffer have calculated Monte Carlo average surface energies of cubic clusters of a lattice gas. When their data for clusters of up to 256 atoms are plotted in the same form as we did before for argon and water (Fig. 13), we see the surface energy of these lattice gas clusters is well described by Eq. (50). 

The work of Briant and Burton and Binder and Stauffer suggest that Eq. (50) is a better general form of the surface energy of a microcluster than that of the drop model. Therefore, we suggest that a nucleation theory be developed using, in Eq. (36), 

---