Size effect in phase transition kinetics

The growth of a spontaneous lattice average magnetization in a magnetic system which is suddenly brought below the transition temperature is a stochastic process in which the very small fluctuations of the initial magnetization are amplified to a macroscopic size. The initial magnetization fluctuates in time around the zero average value because of the finite size of the system. As a consequence of the fluctuation-amplification phenomenon the nonlinear relaxation of the finite system is qualitatively different from that of the infinite one. The present paper studies this feature of phase-transition kinetics in the framework of a very simple model: the dynamical generalization of the spheric…

Self-regulation mechanism of an ecosystem in a non-Gaussian fluctuation regime

We study a dynamical model for an ecological network of many interacting species. We consider a Malthus-Verhulst type of self-regulation mechanism. In the framework of the mean field theory we study the nonlinear relaxation in three different cases: (a) towards the equilibrium state, (b) towards the absorbing barrier, (c) at the critical point. We obtain asymptotic behavior in all different cases for the time average of the process. The dynamical behavior of the system, in the limit of infinitely many interacting species, is investigated in the stability and instability conditions and theoretical results are compared with numerical simulations. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical So…

Kinetics of Ordered Phases in Finite Spin Systems

We study the growth of the ordered phase in a spin system of finite size suddenly brought below the transition temperature. Such a growth is driven by the instability of the mode corresponding to the largest eigenvalue of the interaction matrix. The relaxation occurs through different regimes according to whether the unstable mode has a negligible or macroscopic amplitude. One regime is characterised by dynamical scaling properties whereas in the other we can distinguish the growth to a macroscopic amplitude followed by rare transitions from one equilibrium amplitude to another. The analysis is carried out in the framework of a dynamical generalisation of the spherical model assuming non-ra…

Non linear relaxation in the presence of an absorbing barrier