In the growth of islands and dots on surfaces there are interesting cases, where size-selection of dots is associated with the kinetically determined metastable state affected by both the energetics and kinetics of the growth. The detailed studies of the growth in these cases have been hampered by computational difficulties due to slow convergence towards the metastable state. In this work, we ...

We consider the deterministic escape dynamics of a chain of coupled oscillators under microcanonical conditions from a metastable state over a cubic potential barrier. The underlying dynamics is conservative and noise free. We introduce a two-dimensional chain model and assume that neighboring units are coupled by Morse springs. It is found that, starting from a homogeneous lattice state, due t...

The kinetics of ice growth on the prismatic and basal planes is studied by molecular dynamics simulations. The time evolution of two systems has been investigated. In one a slab of ice is initially in contact with supercooled water, while in the second the ice is in contact with a supercooled salt solution. The simulations were done at a temperature below the eutectic temperature, and complete ...

The thermodynamic properties of the photomagnetic Prussian blue analog K0.3Co[Fe(CN)6]0.77 · 3.6H2O, which exhibits a charge-transfer-induced spin transition (CTIST), are reported. According to the thermal history of the sample, different low-temperature states are obtained: a quenched high-spin state (Q), a low-spin state (LT) achieved through the decay of the Q state, and an intermediate stat...

Many phenomena in nature are described by excitable systems driven by colored noise. The temporal correlations in the fluctuations hinder an analytical treatment. We here present a general method of reduction to a white-noise system, capturing the color of the noise by effective and time-dependent boundary conditions. We apply the formalism to a model of the excitability of neuronal membranes, ...

Review Markov processes with a unique stationary distribution on large state spaces are considered. The task of obtaining a low-dimensional approximate description of the slow-scale dynamics has been treated by many authors with various applications in mind. In this paper Markov state models (MSMs) are reviewed, with the typical setup being a continuous state space and a metastable stochastic p...

Motivated by cold-collision studies of metastable rare-gas atoms @1–4# and prospects of achieving Bose-Einstein condensation in these systems @5#, we present calculations of long-range dispersion ~van der Waals! coefficients for two atoms interacting in the ns(3/2)2 atomic states (n53 for Ne, n54 for Ar, n55 for Kr, and n56 for Xe!. The metastable states have long lifetimes, 43 s for Xe @6#, de...

We consider three classes of dark matter (DM) models to account for the recently observed 3.5 keV line: metastable excited state DM, annihilating DM, and decaying DM. We study two examples of metastable excited state DM. The first, millicharged composite DM, has both inelasticity and photon emission built in, but with a very constrained parameter space. In the second example, up-scattering and ...

A laser spectroscopic method was developed to directly observe the lifetimes of individual states in metastable antiprotonic helium atoms ( p̄ He). Collisional effects with surrounding helium atoms were studied in cryogenic gas targets at pressures between 0.1 and 9.0 bars and at temperatures between 5.5 and 7.0 K. The metastable state (n ,l )5(39,35) showed a lifetime of 1.5 ms, regardless of d...

The aim of quantum mechanics is to explain macroscopic, objectively recorded phenomena. Microscopic objects are measured by enabling them to interact with a macroscopic measuring apparatus prepared in a metastable state. Macroscopic objects, such as cats, are not above the laws of quantum mechanics, but owing to their enormously dense level spectrum other aspects than single eigenvalues and eig...