The influence of an external field on interfacial growth is analyzed within a Ginzburg-Landau model of front propagation. In the field-free case in a rapid temperature quench a metastable phase can be created by a dynamic instability that splits the front separating the stable high-temperature and low-temperature phases [J. Bechhoefer et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 67, 1266 (1991)]. The external field blocks the production of the metastable phase. It is found that the thickness of the metastable phase is a nonmonotonic function of time. It first grows to mesoscopic size and then shrinks to a microscopic layer. Suggestions for observing this effect in real growth experiments are made.
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Bocquet et al. (1994) studied this question.