Nucleation Illuminated

Project by

Tuncay Alan
Senior Fellow 2023–2024

Nucleation and early-stage growth processes are the central, most important stages in the evolution of solid materials. These determine the size, structure, crystallinity, and homogeneity of the end products. However, despite being studied for more than a century, these very early stages of colloidal evolution are still not fully understood. This knowledge gap primarily arises from limited experimental access to immediately before and after nucleation events. The project will investigate new technologies to study what happens in the first micro to milliseconds of a nucleation event and explore how crystals grow.