Kinetics of first-order phase transitions with correlated nuclei

Area of Science:

• Physics
• Physical Chemistry
• Materials Science

Background:

• First-order phase transitions involve changes in material properties.
• Understanding transition kinetics is crucial for controlling material formation.
• Existing models may have limitations in describing complex nucleation behaviors.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a general framework for describing the time evolution of first-order phase transitions.
• To provide an intuitive method for visualizing transition kinetics.
• To analyze the impact of correlated nuclei on transition dynamics.

Main Methods:

• Utilizing the statistics of point processes to model phase transition kinetics.
• Examining attractive and repulsive nucleation scenarios.
• Analyzing isotropic domain growth at a constant rate.
• Calculating nonequilibrium, n-point spatiotemporal correlations.

Main Results:

• The time evolution of phase transitions can be generally described by point process statistics.
• This approach is applicable to both uncorrelated and correlated nuclei.
• The interpretation of the one-point function using stretched-exponential Kolmogorov-Johnson-Mehl-Avrami (KJMA) models is problematic for correlated nuclei.
• Higher-order correlation functions can differentiate between various nucleation scenarios.

Conclusions:

• Point process statistics offer an intuitive framework for visualizing and analyzing phase transition kinetics.
• The study highlights limitations of traditional KJMA interpretations with correlated nuclei.
• Calculating higher-order correlations is essential for a comprehensive understanding of nucleation dynamics.