Kinetics of First-Order Phase Transitions

Abstract

The kinetics of first-order phase transitions is an active branch of research which deals with the dynamics of metastable and unstable states. In these lectures I wish to outline some of the basic experimental and theoretical developments in this field, where I will include computer simulation studies as “numerical” experiments. There are a large number of examples of the phenomena which I wish to describe. These include binary and ternary alloys, simple and binary fluids, polymer blends and many other systems. A general review of the literature has been given quite recently [1]. There has been relatively little attention given so far to magnetic systems. The bulk of the existing work involves computer simulation and theoretical studies of the kinetic Ising models of ferro- and antiferro-magnetism. Although such systems have not yet been studied experimentally, I will discuss them as prototypes of the general phenomena of interest. (It should be noted that these kinetic Ising models have been studied primarily as models of binary alloys such as Al–Zn, rather than magnetism). Other studies of the kinetics of magnetic systems far from equilibrium include models of magnetic alloys [2,3], tricritical metamagnets [4,5] and the clock model [6].