Abstract
The decay of metastable states is initiated by a nucleation process in which a free energy barrier is overcome, while in unstable states fluctuations can grow unaffected by such a barrier. The first part of this review considers the significance of the spinodal line separating the metastable and unstable regime. A Ginzburg criterion for the validity of the spinodal line, as well as for the mean-field theory of nucleation and the linear theory of spinodal decomposition will be discussed. Evidence from simulations and experiments will be mentioned. The second part considers the scaling behavior of the structure function (and droplet or domain size distribution, etc.) in the late stages of the decay: do we understand on which factors the associated exponents depend? Is there a university as in critical phenomena?
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