Theory of Crystal Nucleation and Growth

In examining a crystalline structure as revealed by diffraction experiments it is all too easy to view the crystal as a static entity and focus on what may be broadly termed attractive intermolecular interactions (dipole-dipole, hydrogen bonds, van der Waals etc., as detailed in Section 1.8) and neglect the actual mechanism by which a crystal is formed, i.e. the mechanism by which these interactions act to assemble the crystal from a non-equilibrium state in a super-saturated solution. However, it is very often nucleation phenomena that are ultimately responsible for the observed crystal structure and hence we were careful to draw a distinction between solution self-assembly and crystallisation at the beginning of this chapter. For example paracetamol, when crystallised from acetone solution gives the stable monoclinic crystal form I, but crystallisation from a molten sample in the absence of solvent 

Classically, the process by which crystals are deposited involves the initial clustering of solutes in supersaturated solution into stable or transient assemblies (nucleation) followed by growth once the assembly has reached a critical size. The process is shown below  

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