Recent Viewpoints on the Thermodynamics of Fluctuationless First-Order Phase Transitions

This work focuses on the macroscopic behaviour of a large family of first-order phase transitions, including thermoelastic martensitic transformations, which are practically insensitive to thermal fluctuations and need to be driven by an external field. The Random Field Ising Model at T = 0 is used to carry out a detailed study of the dynamics and thermodynamics of this family of fluctuationless transitions. The main difficulties expected for performing the same kind of analysis on martensitic transformations are outlined.