Estimation of bubble cavitation rates in a symmetrical Lennard-Jones mixture by NVT seeding simulations.

The liquid-vapor transition starts with the formation of a sufficiently large bubble in the metastable liquid to trigger the phase transition. Understanding this process is of fundamental and practical interest, but its study is challenging because it occurs over timescales that are too short for experiments but too long for simulations. The seeding method estimates cavitation rates by simulating a liquid in which a bubble is inserted, thus avoiding the long times needed for its formation. In one-component systems, in the NpT ensemble, the bubble grows or redissolves depending on whether its size is larger or smaller than the critical size, whereas in the NVT ensemble (i.e., at constant number of particles, volume, and temperature), the critical bubble can remain in equilibrium. Provided that a good criterion is used to determine the bubble size, this method, combined with the Classical Nucleation Theory (CNT), gives cavitation rates consistent with those obtained by methods independent of the CNT. In this work, the applicability of NVT seeding to homogeneous cavitation in mixtures is demonstrated, focusing on a partially miscible symmetrical binary Lennard-Jones (LJ) liquid at a temperature within the mixing regime. At the same stretching pressure, cavitation rates are higher in the binary mixture than in the pure liquid due to the lower interfacial free energy of the mixture. Curiously, the cost of creating a bubble is similar in the pure and binary LJ liquids at the same metastability, Δμ/Δμ, with Δμ being the difference in chemical potential between the metastable liquid and coexistence, and Δμ between the spinodal and coexistence.