Eliminating overgrowth effects in Kolmogorov-Johnson-Mehl-Avrami model through the correlation among actual nuclei

It has been shown that the Kolmogorov-Johnson-Mehl-Avrami (KJMA) solution of phase transition kinetics can be set as a problem of correlated nucleation (Phys. Rev. B 65 (2002) 172301). In this paper the equivalence between the standard solution and the approach that makes use of the actual nucleation rate, i.e., that takes into account spatial correlation among nuclei and/or grains, is shown by a direct calculation in case of linear growth and constant nucleation rate. As a consequence, the intrinsic limit of KJMA theory due to the phenomenon of phantom overgrowth is, at last, overcome. Thanks to this new approach it is possible, for instance, to describe phase transition governed by diffusion. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.