An undergraduate laboratory experiment on nucleation and growth via polarizing optical microscopy of semicrystalline polymers

Editor's Note: In this work, the authors describe an experiment that examines the nucleation and growth of a polymer film from an undercooled melt using polarized optical microscopy, where the size of the resulting birefringent domains (termed spherulites) is used to extract information about the nucleation density at different temperatures. This experiment combines principles from soft matter, solid state physics, thermodynamics, and optics and will be of interest to instructional laboratory developers wishing to introduce a low-cost materials science experiment in their curricula.