We establish that the entropy production rate of a classically chaotic Hamiltonian system coupled to the environment settles, after a transient, to a metastable value given by the sum of positive generalized Lyapunov exponents. A metastable steady state is generated in this process. This behavior also occurs in quantum systems close to the classical limit, where it leads to the restoration of q...

A metastable lattice gas with nearest-neighbor interactions and continuous-time dynamics is studied using a generalized Becker-Döring approach in the multidimensional space of cluster configurations. The preexponential of the metastable-state lifetime (inverse of nucleation rate) is found to exhibit distinct peaks at integer values of the inverse supersaturation. Peaks are unobservable (infinit...

The extinction of a single species due to demographic stochasticity is analyzed. The discrete nature of the individual agents and the Poissonian noise related to the birth-death processes result in local extinction of a metastable population, as the system hits the absorbing state. The Fokker-Planck formulation of that problem fails to capture the statistics of large deviations from the metasta...

CdSe nanocrystals in solution and films can enter a metastable state in which the highly luminescent nanocrystals become dark. This change, which we attribute to a surface transformation, can be caused by heating or by changing the environment of the nanocrystals at room temperature. The metastable transformation is reversed upon illumination of above-band-gap light, at which point the nanocrys...

The crystal structure of [Ni(NO)(η5-Cp*)] in the light-induced metastable state was determined by X-ray diffraction at 25 K of a crystal with a 47% metastable-state population. The most significant geometrical change is the formation of a side (η2) bound structure with an Ni-N-O angle of 92(1)°, compared with 179.2(2)° in the most stable configuration, and a corresponding Ni-O distance of 2.09 ...

Skyrmions, topologically protected nanometric spin vortices, are being investigated extensively in various magnets. Among them, many structurally chiral cubic magnets host the triangular-lattice skyrmion crystal (SkX) as the thermodynamic equilibrium state. However, this state exists only in a narrow temperature and magnetic-field region just below the magnetic transition temperature Tc, while ...

The well-known classical nucleation theory (CNT) for the free energy barrier towards formation of a nucleus of critical size of the new stable phase within the parent metastable phase fails to take into account the influence of other metastable phases having density/order intermediate between the parent metastable phase and the final stable phase. This lacuna can be more serious than capillary ...

We propose a new geometric approach to describe the qualitative dynamics of chemical reactions networks. By this method we identify metastable regimes, defined as low dimensional regions of the phase space close to which the dynamics is much slower compared to the rest of the phase space. These metastable regimes depend on the network topology and on the orders of magnitude of the kinetic param...

Time resolved atomic emission, atomic absorbance, and laser-induced atomic fluorescence measurements of a Ž3 . millisecond pulsed glow discharge, made perpendicular to the insertion probe, provide temporal profiles of 1s P 5 2 Ž3 . and 1s P metastable argon atom populations. Acquisition of these profiles at different spatial positions in the 3 0 plasma provides data from which two-dimensional s...