Static and dynamical aspects of the metastable states of first order transition systems

We numerically study the metastable states of the 2d Potts model. Both of equilibrium and relaxation properties are investigated focusing on the finite size effect. The former is investigated by finding the free energy extremal point by the Wang-Landau sampling and the latter is done by observing the Metropolis dynamics after sudden heating. It is explicitly shown that with increasing system size the equilibrium spinodal temperature approaches the bistable temperature in a power-law and the size-dependence of the nucleation dynamics agrees with it. In addition, we perform finite size scaling of the free energy landscape at the bistable point.