Nucleation Mechanism of Iron in an External Magnetic Field

In this work, the solidification of liquid iron with or without external magnetic field was investigated by using two molecular dynamics methods, namely direct cooling and two-phase simulation. The influence of external magnetic field on the solidification is characterized by the critical temperature and radial distribution functions. Our computational results show that under external magnetic field, the solidification point tends to decrease significantly. By further analyzing the diffusion coefficients and viscosity, we attribute the effect to the stronger fluctuation of liquid iron atoms driven by the external magnetic field.