In modern science, the frontier between pure discovery and technology is a blurred, fertile ground where pure curiosity meets applications. E-Nucl resides in this liminal space, where insights from fundamental physics can reshape the design rules of next-generation microtechnologies. The purpose of E-Nucl is to bridge the gap between atomistic and continuum mechanics to address the multiscale nature of the nucleation phenomenon. We employ fluctuating hydrodynamics, coupled with diffuse-interface thermodynamics and rare-event techniques from large deviation theory, to fully resolve the phase transition process. Our aim is to obtain a time-resolved and multiscale picture of nucleation in fluids through the use of a high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure to conduct in-silico trials that inform the design of novel microtechnologies. Check out the dissemination article over here.

Within the E-Nucl project, we discovered complex transition pathways for vapor bubble nucleation in metastable liquids, under both homogeneous and heterogeneous conditions. Published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics (Gallo et al., 2025), the study combines Navier–Stokes–Korteweg dynamics with rare-event techniques, showing that nucleation deviates from classical theory and is driven by long-wavelength fluctuations. A new hydrodynamics-based strategy to infer nucleation times was validated, also revealing unexpected effects of surface wettability. The approach is general and extendable to real fluids and complex geometries. Check it out here.