The Time Lag in Transient Nucleation

The time lag in transient nucleation was originally introduced to characterize the temporal evolution of the nucleation current in the simplest possible way. Previous attempts to calculate the time lag have relied mainly on either the approximate solution of the continuous Fokker-Planck equation or the numerical solution of the discrete rate equations. It is shown that the exact time lag can be calculated using a different method which requires knowledge only of the initial and the steady-state cluster populations.