Nucleation and growth manifest universal scaling, surely

Abstract

When a system is brought to a metastable state, nuclei of the equilibrium phase form and grow. This is the well-known nucleation and growth of first-order phase transitions. Near a critical point of a continuous phase transition, critical phenomena such as critical opalescence characterized by universal scaling emerge. These two sets of behavior are so completely different that it might appear absurd to ask whether nucleation and growth exhibit even a slight universal scaling. Here we show that universal scaling is indeed manifested in standard nucleation and growth by introducing a non-universal initial time to a recently proposed method. This generalizes the method and provides a different perspective for studying universal scaling behavior and hence universality classes of nucleation and growth.

5 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (5)

• "Deconfined" quantum critical points
• Metastable lifetimes in a kinetic Ising model: Dependence on field and system size
• On spinodal points and Lee-Yang edge singularities
• Complete universal scaling in first-order phase transitions
• Universal scaling in first-order phase transitions mixed with nucleation and growth

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Is there Kibble-Zurek scaling of topological defects in first-order phase transitions?
• Complete universal scaling of first-order phase transitions in the two-dimensional Ising model