On today’s issue of CHEM, CAICE investigator Francesco Paesani writes an invited commentary on the recently published CAICE funded work of Valeria Molinero’s group on the “role of stacking disorder in ice nucleation” and discuss how they used computer simulations to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of ice nucleation. Their simulations demonstrate that the initial crystallites are stacking disordered as a result of entropy gains and predict nucleation rates orders of magnitude faster than those estimated by classical nucleation theory.
