Chapter 1 . Phenomenological

These chapters discuss the problems of nucleation, spinodal decomposition and continuous ordering, and domain growth. The first and most obvious question that we will address is “What is the nature of these processes?” We will begin with simple theories that yield most of the physics correctly, but many of the details are not quite right. We will compare these theories with data from experiments and computer simulations. In many cases we will need to use simulations because the relevant data is too difficult to extract from experiments.