A dynamical approach to metastability
Abstract Book of the XXIII IUPAP International Conference on Statistical Physics, Genova, Italy, (9-13 July 2007)Abstract
Metastable systems are not, as is well-known, either in or even close to, thermodynamic equilibrium. Nevertheless, thermodynamic approaches treating such systems as if they were in equilibrium have been quite surprisingly effective. Such approaches have, however, some intrinsic limitations. In particular, since equilibrium behaviour is postulated, it is not possible to understand in this framework why such equilibrium approaches work and when they should fail. Here we present a dynamical approach to metastability, similar to that of Gaveau and Schulman, assuming that the system obeys a Markovian dynamics. We show that under some mild assumptions the equilibrium approach can indeed be justified in the spirit of the restricted ensemble approach pioneered by Penrose and Lebowitz. An extension to the study of multiple metastable states is also presented.