Vapor nucleation in metastable liquids: The continuum description

Abstract

Liquid-vapor phase change is of importance across a wide spectrum of fundamental and applied disciplines. The phenomenology of vapor formation is very complex due to the large range of spatio-temporal scales involved. Here, the microscopic features of vapor embryos nucleation coexist with the macroscopic bubble dynamics. This multiscale nature of the phenomenon makes nucleation challenging both from a theoretical and experimental point of view. In this work, we aim to retrace the state of art of continuum description of liquid-vapor phase change, starting from the classical nucleation theory, which provides a basic description of the phenomenon up to the phase field description and fluctuating hydrodynamics theory.