title: Limitations of a Fokker-Planck description of nucleation.
abstract: In most nucleation theories, the dynamics of nucleation is characterized by the evolution in time of the mass of droplets, and this time evolution is described as a combination of drift and diffusion. This assumes that the mass fluctations are described by a Markovian, i.e., memoryless, stochastic process. This paper presents a method to assess in how far this assumption of Markovianity is valid. The method is employed in nucleation studies in a two-dimensional Ising model at temperature T=0.88T(c), both with spin flip dynamics and with local spin exchange dynamics. In the first case, it shows that the evolution of droplet masses might be effectively described by a Markov process on large time scales. In the latter case, however, the dynamics are far from Markovian. We argue that this is due to the presence of a locally conserved quantity.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Theoretical Physics, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands. jkuipers@phys.uu.nl
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kuipers
authors.forename: G T
authors.initials: GT
authors.lastname: Barkema