2003/07/31 by Kyungwha Park, Per Arne Rikvold, Gloria M. Buendia +2 · 1 citation
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Stochastic processes and statistical mechanics #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.mtrl-sci #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.92.015701
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 015701 (2004). · 4 pages RevTex4, 2 figures. Phys. Rev. Lett., in press
arxiv created 2003/11/14 · openalex publication_date 2004/01/06 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study low-temperature nucleation in kinetic Ising models by analytical and simulational methods, confirming the general result for the average metastable lifetime, ⟨\ensuremathτ⟩=Aexp(\ensuremathβ\ensuremathΓ) (\ensuremathβ=1/kBT) [E. Jord\~ao Neves and R. H. Schonmann, Commun. Math. Phys. 137, 209 (1991)]. Contrary to common belief, we find that both A and \ensuremathΓ depend significantly on the stochastic dynamic. In particular, for a ``soft'' dynamic, in which the effects of the interactions and the applied field factorize in the transition rates, \ensuremathΓ does not simply equal the energy barrier against nucleation, as it does for the standard Glauber dynamic, which does not have this factorization property.