How does a hyperuniform fluid freeze?

Abstract

All phase transitions can be categorized into two different types: continuous and discontinuous phase transitions. Discontinuous phase transitions are normally accompanied with significant structural changes, and nearly all of them have the kinetic pathway of nucleation and growth, if the system does not suffer from glassy dynamics. Here, in a system of barrier-controlled reactive particles, we find that the discontinuous freezing transition of a nonequilibrium hyperuniform fluid into an absorbing state does not have the kinetic pathway of nucleation and growth, and the transition is triggered by long-wavelength fluctuations. The transition rate decreases with increasing the system size, which suggests that the metastable hyperuniform fluid could be kinetically stable in an infinitely large system. This challenges the common understanding of metastability in discontinuous phase transitions. Moreover, we find that the “metastable yet kinetically stable” hyperuniform fluid features a scaling in the structure factor S ( k → 0 ) ∼ k 1.2 in 2D, which is the third dynamic hyperuniform state in addition to the critical hyperuniform state with S ( k → 0 ) ∼ k 0.45 and the nonequilibrium hyperuniform fluid with S ( k → 0 ) ∼ k 2 .