Reentrant Behavior of the Spinodal Curve in a Nonequilibrium Ferromagnet

Abstract

The metastable behavior of a kinetic Ising--like ferromagnetic model system in which a generic type of microscopic disorder induces nonequilibrium steady states is studied by computer simulation and a mean--field approach. We pay attention, in particular, to the spinodal curve or intrinsic coercive field that separates the metastable region from the unstable one. We find that, under strong nonequilibrium conditions, this exhibits reentrant behavior as a function of temperature. That is, metastability does not happen in this regime for both low and high temperatures, but instead emerges for intermediate temperature, as a consequence of the non-linear interplay between thermal and nonequilibrium fluctuations. We argue that this behavior, which is in contrast with equilibrium phenomenology and could occur in actual impure specimens, might be related to the presence of an effective multiplicative noise in the system.

7 pages, 4 figures; Final version to appear in Phys. Rev. E; Section V has been revised

References in corpus (4)

• On the metastability of the Standard Model vacuum
• Generic mechanism for generating a liquid-liquid phase transition
• Low temperature properties of core-softened models: water vs. silica behavior
• Metastability in simple climate models: Pathwise analysis of slowly driven Langevin equations

Cited by in corpus (4)

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