Dynamical Growth Rate of a Diffuse Interface in First Order Phase Transitions

Abstract

We compute the dynamical prefactor in the nucleation rate of bubbles or droplets in first order phase transitions for the case where both viscous damping and thermal dissipation are significant. This result, which generalizes previous work on nucleation, may be applied to study the growth of bubbles or droplets in condensed matter systems as well as in heavy ion collisions and in the expansion of the early universe.

Comments: LaTex, 9 pages, TPI-MINN-93-34/T, NUC-MINN-93-17/T