Structure and morphology of crystalline nuclei arising in a crystallizing liquid metallic film

Control of the crystallization process at the microscopic level makes it possible to generate the nano-crystalline samples with the desired structural and morphological properties, that is of great importance for modern industry. In the present work, we study the influence of supercooling on the structure and morphology of the crystalline nuclei arising and growing within a liquid metallic film. The cluster analysis allows us to compute the diffraction patterns and to evaluate the morphological characteristics (the linear sizes of the homogeneous part and the thickness of the surface layer) of the crystalline nuclei emergent in the system at different levels of supercooling. We find that the liquid metallic film at the temperatures corresponded to low supercooling levels crystallizes into a monocrystal, whereas a poly-crystalline structure forms at deep supercooling levels. We find that the temperature dependence of critical size of the crystalline nuclei contains two distinguishable regimes with the crossover temperature T/T-g approximate to 1.15 (T-g is the glass transition temperature), which appears due to the specific geometry of the system. (C) 2019 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.