Abstract:

A study on the kinetics of condensational drop growth in the SANC chamber has resulted in definitive data on mass and thermal accommodation coefficients for the condensation of water vapor molecules onto liquid water (Winkler et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 075701 (2004)).
The first experiments on binary heterogeneous nucleation were performed and a soluble-insoluble transition was discovered. A new theory has been formulated providing a satifactory description (Petersen et. al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 225703 (2001)).
In the SANC chamber molecular clusters were activated due to heterogeneous nucleation thereby bridging the scale from nanoparticles to molecular clusters (Winkler et al., Science 319, 1374 (2008)).
Activation of single seed molecules was observed well below the Kelvin prediction. Using the heterogeneous nucleation theorem we found the activation of molecules into droplets to happen via the formation of critical clusters substantially larger than the seed molecules and well predicted by the Kelvin-Thomson relation (Winkler et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 085701 (2012)).