Critical macroscopic quantum effects in quantum nucleation

¹ Institute of Theoretical Physics and Department of Physics Shanxi University, Taiyuan - Shanxi, 030006, PRC
² National Laboratory for Magnetism, Institute of Physics Chinese Academy of Sciences - Beijing 100080, PRC
³ Department of Physics, University of Kaiserslautern 67653 Kaiserslautern, Germany
⁴ Department of Physics, Kyung Nam University - Masan 631-701, Korea

Received: 7 January 2004
Accepted: 20 September 2004

Abstract

It is shown that a characteristic feature of quantum nucleation viewed as a decay process of metastable states is that the theoretical temperature dependence of the nucleation rate indicates a sharp first-order phase transition of the crossover from the quantum tunneling regime to the thermal hopping regime. We, furthermore, demontrate that the experimentally observed temperature dependence of the phase separation of supersaturated - liquid mixtures at low temperatures can be understood by the first-order phase transition of quantum nucleation.