Environmental interactions with nuclei

In this context, cooperativity does not necessarily mean that different parts of the system depend on and need to interact with each other to change the macrostate (or the phase). Rather, local parts of the system can react individually in the same way upon a weak change of the environmental conditions. In the freezing transition of water, nucleation cores form independently and attract other molecules in the local environment of each nucleus to join. This leads to macroscopic crystalline structures which finally bind to each other in order to reduce instabilities due to surface effects. However, the individual growth of the nucleation centers also causes dislocations that typically appear at the boundaries of these crystalline substructures,... 

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