Recent topics on metastability, hysteresis, avalanches, and acoustic emission associated to martensitic transitions in functional materials

We review some results for the dynamics of first-order phase transitions in functional materials. We especially focus on simple models of athermal evolution in driven ferromagnets that give a global picture of metastability and hysteresis, showing that first-order phase transitions in such systems proceed by avalanches. Within this theoretical framework, we then discuss recent experiments on acoustic emission avalanches in structural phase transitions.