Narrowing down the cause of the hard-sphere nucleation discrepancy: The free energy of precritical nuclei is consistent with predictions

Predicting the rate of crystal nucleation is among the most substantial long-standing challenges in condensed matter. In the system most studied (hard-sphere colloids), the discrepancy between experiments and computer simulations is more than 10 orders of magnitude. The situation with other materials (such as water) is no better. Here, we address this challenge with two developments. First, our work is a marked improvement in the precision of mapping the state point of experiments to simulation.