Fluctuation Relations and Crystallization in Colloidal Suspensions

Hard Spheres undergo a fluid to solid phase transition if the packing fraction is above $0.5$. The nucleation process itself and developing structures in this transient process are still matter of current research. \\
Here a new approach is proposed to correlate forming structure and dissipation directly. The system driven externally by a time varying pressure is compressed in a finite time. Thermodynamic work measured and directly correlated to structural information recorded during the process. Fluctuation theorems set the framework of this analysis that still hold at the first order phase transition that are initialized by a macroscopic fluctuation.