title: Nucleation rate of critical droplets on an elastic string in a phi6 potential.
abstract: We obtain the nucleation rate of critical droplets for an elastic string moving in a phi(6) local potential and subject to noise and damping forces. The critical droplet is a bound soliton-antisoliton pair that carries a section of the string out of the metastable central minimum into one of the stable side minima. The frequencies of small oscillations about the critical droplet are obtained from a Heun equation. We solve the Fokker-Planck equation for the phase-space probability density by projecting it onto the eigenfunction basis obtained from the Heun equation. We employ Farkas' "flux-overpopulation" method to obtain boundary conditions for solving the Fokker-Planck equation; these restrict the validity of our solution to the moderate to heavy damping regime. We present results for the rate as a function of temperature, well depth, and damping.
authors.affiliation: Olin Physical Laboratory, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 27109-7507, USA. wck@wfu.edu
authors.forename: W C
authors.initials: WC
authors.lastname: Kerr
authors.forename: A J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Graham