Vapor nucleation in metastable liquids: the continuum description

Liquid–vapor phase change is of importance across a wide spectrum of fundamental and applied disciplines. The phenomenology of vapor formation is very complex due to the large range of spatio-temporal scales involved. Here, the microscopic features of vapor embryos nucleation coexist with the macroscopic bubble dynamics. This multiscale nature of the phenomenon makes nucleation challenging both from a theoretical and experimental point of view. In this work, we aim to retrace the state of art of continuum description of liquid–vapor phase change, starting from the classical nucleation theory, which provides a basic description of the phenomenon up to the phase field description and fluctuating hydrodynamics theory.