Viscoelasticity and metastability limit in supercooled liquids

A supercooled liquid is said to have a kinetic spinodal if a temperature Tsp exists below which the liquidrelaxation time exceeds the crystal nucleation time. We revisit classical nucleation theory taking intoaccount the viscoelastic response of the liquid to the formation of crystal nuclei and find that the kineticspinodal is strongly influenced by elastic effects. We introduce a dimensionless parameter , which isessentially the ratio between the infinite frequency shear modulus and the enthalpy of fusion of the crystal.In systems where is larger than a critical value c the metastability limit is totally suppressed,independently of the surface tension. On the other hand, if