Multiple Scenarios of Low-Temperature Nucleation in Simple Liquids.

Usually, sufficient supercooling of a liquid is employed to bypass the free energy barrier and speed up crystallization. However, lowering the temperature T induces new issues competing with the crystallization, e.g., slow particle motion, geometric frustration, and the glass formation, which complicates our understanding of crystal growth. Here we systematically study the low-temperature nucleation kinetics discriminated by the maximum nucleation rate temperature T_{d} and the glass transition temperature T_{g}. At T_{d}, the ratio of the precursor and geometrically frustrated particles reaches the maximum. When T_{g}