Extracting nucleation rates from current-time transients: further comments

We observe that in his further comments, Fletcher has not replied to any of the points i-ix which we made in our reply to his initial criticisms of the three papers submitted to this journal. We restrict attention here to a part of our comment (viii), in our previous reply namely that the inhibition of nucleation on a microelectrode substrate by the diffusion field generated by the first nucleation event is determined by the dimensions of the microelectrode and not by microelectrode separations. We also make some further comments on the Monte Carlo simulations of nucleation events which confirm statements which have been made previously. We note that the shape of the plots of the probability of nucleation versus time can deviate markedly from a simple exponential form even in the absence of the operation of any new principles. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.