[STAT/AP] Simone Baldassari: Homogeneous nucleation for two-dimensional Kawasaki dynamics

19 February 2024 15:45 till 16:45 - Location: Lecture Hall D@ta | Add to my calendar

We study a lattice gas subject to Kawasaki dynamics in an exponentially large box in the inverse temperature of the gas. Each pair of neighbouring particles has a negative binding energy, while each particle has a positive activation energy. The initial configuration is drawn from the grand-canonical ensemble restricted to the set of configurations where all the droplets are subcritical. Our goal is to describe, in the metastable regime and in the limit as the temperature goes to zero, how and when the system nucleates, i.e., creates a critical droplet somewhere in the box that subsequently grows by absorbing particles from the surrounding gas. We will see that in a "very large volume" critical droplets appear more or less independently in boxes of "moderate volume", a phenomenon referred to as homogeneous nucleation. This is a joint work with Alexandre Gaudillière, Frank den Hollander, Francesca Romana Nardi, Enzo Olivieri and Elisabetta Scoppola.