Orateur
Description
When fluctuations are suppressed in first order phase transitions, bubble nucleation may be too slow to complete the transition, and the system may explore configurations beyond stable and metastable states. The system can exhibit qualitative differences in thermodynamic and dynamic properties depending on the strength of the coupling, or more precisely, on the number of degrees of freedom involved in the transition. We propose an effective theory coupling a fluid to a scalar order parameter to account for the observed behaviour. The effective theory is a generalization of fluid-scalar models used to describe the dynamics of bubbles in cosmological phase transitions. We test the validity of the effective theory against microscopic results using holography.