Related papers: Metastability in Fluctuation Driven First-order Tr…
The nucleation of a droplet of stable cylinder phase from a metastable lamellar phase is examined within the single-mode approximation to the Brazovskii model for diblock copolymer melts. By employing a variational ansatz for the droplet…
Many systems where interactions compete with each other or with constraints are well described by a model first introduced by Brazovskii. Such systems include block copolymers, alloys with modulated phases, Rayleigh-Benard Cells and type-I…
Nucleation is the onset of a first-order phase transition by which a metastable phase transforms into a more stable one. Such a phase transition occurs when an initial system initially in equilibrium is destabilized by the change of an…
Two centuries of research on phase transitions have repeatedly highlighted the importance of critical fluctuations that abound in the vicinity of a critical point. They are at the origin of scaling laws obeyed by thermodynamic observables…
Effects of charge-density fluctuations on a phase behavior of the restricted primitive model (RPM) are studied within a field-theoretic formalism. We focus on a $\lambda$-line of continuous transitions between charge-ordered and…
Crystallization of supersaturated liquids usually starts by heterogeneous nucleation. Mounting evidence shows that even homogeneous nucleation in simple liquids takes place in two steps; first a dense amorphous precursor forms, and the…
We study random copolymers consisted of two kinds of monomers with attraction between similar kinds. The mean field analysis of this system indicates a continuous phase transition into a phase with periodic microdomain structure. It is…
Heterogeneous nucleation is central to many familiar first-order phase transitions such as the freezing of water and the solidification of metals, and it can also play a crucial role in cosmology. We examine nucleation seeded by preexisting…
We present a consistent calculation of bubble-nucleation rates in theories of two scalar fields. Our approach is based on the notion of a coarse-grained free energy that incorporates the effects of fluctuations with momenta above a given…
The emergence upon cooling of an ordered solid phase from a liquid is a remarkable example of self-assembly, which has also major practical relevance. Here, we use a recently developed committor-based enhanced sampling method [Kang et al.,…
We review how phase-field models contributed to the understanding of various aspects of crystal nucleation including homogeneous and heterogeneous processes, and their role in microstructure evolution. We recall results obtained both by the…
Using the renormalization group method, new type of fluctuation-driven first order phase transitions and critical phenomena are predicted for certain classes of ferromagnetic superconductors and superfluids with unconventional…
First-order phase transitions occur through the nucleation of critical bubbles of the stable phase within the metastable phase. Using holography, we present a fully microscopic description of these bubbles in a strongly coupled,…
The process of homogeneous crystal nucleation has been considered in a model liquid, where the interparticle interaction is described by a short-range spherical oscillatory potential. Mechanisms of initiating structural ordering in the…
We study the critical phenomena of the dynamical transition from a metastable state to a stable state in the model of first-order phase transition via two different triggering mechanisms. Three universal stages during the fully nonlinear…
Nucleation is considered near the pseudospinodal in a one-dimensional $\phi^4$ model with a non-conserved order parameter and long-range interactions. For a sufficiently large system or a system with slow relaxation to metastable…
We study the kinetics of the first order phase separation transition in boson-fermion cold-atom mixtures. At sufficiently low temperatures such a transition is driven by quantum fluctuations responsible for the formation of critical nuclei…
The granular microstructure of metals evolves significantly during thermomechanical processing through viscoplastic deformation and recrystallization. Microstructural features such as grain boundaries (GBs), subgrains, localized deformation…
The dynamics of phase transitions plays a crucial r\^ole in the so-called interface between high energy particle physics and cosmology. Many of the interesting results generated during the last fifteen years or so rely on simplified…
We report an experimental study on the transition between a disordered liquid-like state and a ordered solid-like one, in a collection of magnetically interacting macroscopic grains. A monolayer of magnetized particles is vibrated…