Kinetics of Propagating Phase Transformation in Compressed Bismuth

The authors observed dynamically driven phase transitions in isentropically compressed bismuth. By changing the stress loading conditions they explored two distinct cases one in which the experimental signature of the phase transformation corresponds to phase-boundary crossings initiated at both sample interfaces, and another in which the experimental trace is due to a single advancing transformation front in the bulk of the material. They introduce a coupled kinetics-hydrodynamics model that for this second case enables them, under suitable simplifying assumptions, to directly extract characteristic transition times from the experimental measurements