Renormalisation-theoretic analysis of non-equilibrium phase transitions II: The effect of perturbations on rate coefficients in the Becker-Doring equations

Abstract

We study in detail the application of renormalisation theory to models of cluster aggregation and fragmentation of relevance to nucleation and growth processes. In particular, we investigate the Becker-Doring (BD) equations, originally formulated to describe and analyse non-equilibrium phase transitions, but more recently generalised to describe a wide range of physicochemical problems. We consider here rate coefficients which depend on the cluster size in a power-law fashion, but now perturbed by small amplitude random noise. Power-law rate coefficients arise naturally in the theory of surface-controlled nucleation and growth processes. The noisy perturbations on these rates reflect the effect of microscopic variations in such mean-field coefficients, thermal fluctuations and/or experimental uncertainties. In the present paper we generalise our earlier work that identified the nine classes into which all dynamical behaviour must fall by investigating how random perturbations of the rate coefficients influence the steady-state and kinetic behaviour of the coarse-grained, renormalised system. We are hence able to confirm the existence of a set of up to nine universality classes for such BD systems.