Dynamic Off-Equilibrium Transition in Systems Slowly Driven across Thermal First-Order Phase Transitions

We study the off-equilibrium behavior of systems with short-range interactions, slowly driven across a thermal first-order transition, where the equilibrium dynamics is exponentially slow. We consider a dynamics that starts in the high-T phase at time t=t_{i}<0 and ends at t=t_{f}>0 in the low-T phase, with a time-dependent temperature T(t)/T_{c}≈1-t/t_{s}, where t_{s} is the protocol time scale. A general off-equilibrium scaling (OS) behavior emerges in the limit of large t_{s}. We check it at the first-order transition of the two-dimensional q-state Potts model with q=20 and 10. The numerical results show evidence of a dynamic transition, where the OS functions show a spinodal-like singularity. Therefore, the general mean-field picture valid for systems with long-range interactions is qualitatively recovered, provided the time dependence is appropriately (logarithmically) rescaled.