Potential energy surface metastable state decay

When the system is quenched into the metastable region between the coexistence curve and the spinodal, the resulting metastable phase may not spontaneously decay into two-phase equilibrium. The transformation must be activated by some perturbation, such as thermal fluctuations. Consider a spherical liquid droplet, of radius R, immersed in the uniform metastable vapour. The diflerence of the chemical potential in the metastable state and the chemical potential in equilibrium is A/x = p-pcxc- The total Gibbs energy of the droplet is given by the sum of the bulk and surface energy contributions. 

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