Abstract.
Using computer simulations, we study metastability in a two-dimensional Ising ferromagnet relaxing toward a nonequilibrium steady state. The interplay between thermal and nonequilibrium fluctuations induces resonant and scale-invariant phenomena not observed in equilibrium. In particular, we measure noise-enhanced stability of the metastable state in a nonequilibrium environment. The limit of metastability, or pseudospinodal separating the metastable regime from the unstable one, exhibits reentrant behavior as a function of temperature for strong nonequilibrium conditions. Furthermore, when subject to both open boundaries and nonequilibrium fluctuations, the metastable system decays via well-defined avalanches. These exhibit power-law size and lifetime distributions, resembling the scale-free avalanche dynamics observed in real magnets and other complex systems. We expect some of these results to be verifiable in actual (impure) specimens.
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For parameters (T,p,h) such that the mean lifetime is not very large, one can measure τ(T,p,h) using standard Monte Carlo methods. In all cases, results obtained with standard and rejection-free techniques agree perfecly. In particular, the noise-enhanced stability (NES) phenomenon is recovered in standard simulations, ruling out the possibility of NES being an artifact due to the slow-forcing approximation.
The prefix pseudo in pseudospinodal stems from the fact that the metastable-unstable transition is not a sharp transition at h*, but instead it is a progressive crossover from a metastable phase for |h|<h* to an unstable one for |h|>h* (see inset to Fig. 2).
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Hurtado, P., Marro, J. & Garrido, P. Stochastic resonance and scale invariance in nonequilibrium metastable states. Eur. Phys. J. B 49, 103–108 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2006-00029-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2006-00029-9