Description
By adding a suitably defined elastic energy term to the free energy, a new free energy function is obtained which, over a limited composition range, has all the properties of a thermodynamic potential for coherent process. It may be used for instance to obtain the coherent phase diagram by the ordinary method of common tangents, and in this paper it is used to examine the coherent nucleation in isotropic solids, especially in the vicinity of the limit of metastability, where such nucleation is not classical.