Bubble nucleation in the two-flavor quark-meson model* * Supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (11675048)

We investigate the dynamics of a first-order quark-hadron transition via homogeneous thermal nucleation in the two-flavor quark-meson model. The contribution of the fermionic vacuum loop in the effective thermodynamics potential and phase diagram, together with the location of the critical endpoint (CEP), is obtained in the temperature and chemical potential plane. For weak and strong first-order phase transitions, by taking the temperature as a variable, the critical bubble profiles, evolutions of the surface tension, and saddle-point action in the presence of a nucleation bubble are numerically calculated in detail when fixing the chemical potentials at and . Our results show that the system could be trapped in the metastable state for a long time as long as the temperature is between the metastable region characterized by the up and low spinodal lines. Moreover, the surface tension at criticality will rise to approximately when the chemical potential is very high. Such a small surface tension value would favor a mixed phase in the cores of compact stars and may have an important implication in astrophysics.