title: Kinetics of first-order phase transitions with correlated nuclei.
abstract: We demonstrate that the time evolution of a first-order phase transition may be described quite generally in terms of the statistics of point processes, thereby providing an intuitive framework for visualizing transition kinetics. A number of attractive and repulsive nucleation scenarios is examined followed by isotropic domain growth at a constant rate This description holds for both uncorrelated and correlated nuclei, and may be employed to calculate the nonequilibrium, n-point spatiotemporal correlations that characterize the transition. Furthermore, it is shown that the interpretation of the one-point function in terms of a stretched-exponential, Kolmogorov-Johnson-Mehl-Avrami result is problematic in the case of correlated nuclei, but that the calculation of higher-order correlation functions permits one to distinguish among various nucleation scenarios.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania 18015, USA.|Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania 18015, USA.
authors.forename: J M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Rickman
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, USA.
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Barmak