Pseudospinodals, spinodals, and nucleation

Abstract

We develop a field-theoretic description of nucleation for systems with long-range interactions undergoing deep quenches. We find that the critical droplet can be related to a percolation cluster and has a fractal dimension less than the spatial dimension $d$. For $d>\mathrm{}6\mathrm{}$ "spinodals" are found for any potential range $R$; in contrast, for $d<\mathrm{}6\mathrm{}$ spinodals are found only for $R\to \infty$. We also compare our results to those of mean-field theory.