The aging of nuclei in a binary mixture

A theory of nucleation for a metastable binary mixture is developed, based on the Cahn-Hilliard theory of phase separation. It is shown that at least in its intermediate stages the transition from a supersaturated state to an energetically favored separated state follows the typical mechanism of surface tension governed nucleation processes and long-time similarity solutions describing the distribution of nuclei are found, analagous to the results of Lifshitz et al. It is shown that spatially uniform nucleation is destabilized by diffusion and the modifications to the nucleation process due to spatial inhomogeneity are found.