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Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 015701 (2004) [4 pages]

Low-Temperature Nucleation in a Kinetic Ising Model with Soft Stochastic Dynamics

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Kyungwha Park1,2, Per Arne Rikvold2,3, Gloria M. Buendía2,3,4, and M. A. Novotny3
1Center for Computational Materials Science, Code 6390, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington D.C. 20375, USA
2School of Computational Science and Information Technology, Center for Materials Research and Technology, and Department of Physics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306-4120, USA
3Department of Physics and Astronomy and ERC Center for Computational Sciences, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, Mississippi 39762-5167, USA
4Department of Physics, Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas 1080, Venezuela

Received 23 July 2003; published 6 January 2004

We study low-temperature nucleation in kinetic Ising models by analytical and simulational methods, confirming the general result for the average metastable lifetime, ⟨τ⟩=Aexp⁡(βΓ) (β=1/kBT) [ E. Jordão Neves and R. H. Schonmann Commun. Math. Phys. 137 209 (1991)]. Contrary to common belief, we find that both A and Γ 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, Γ does not simply equal the energy barrier against nucleation, as it does for the standard Glauber dynamic, which does not have this factorization property.

© 2004 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.92.015701
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.92.015701
PACS:
64.60.Qb, 02.50.Ga, 64.60.My, 75.60.Jk
 
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