Metastabiele

Metastabiele is a term derived from "metastable" and denotes a state of a physical, chemical, biological or engineered system that is stable against small disturbances but not the most energetically favorable configuration. A metastable state occupies a local minimum in an energy landscape separated from the global minimum by an energy barrier; the system can remain in that state for an appreciable time until a fluctuation or perturbation triggers a transition to a more stable state.

Common examples include supercooled liquids that remain liquid below their freezing point, polymorphic forms of a solid (such as certain pharmaceutical crystals), diamond relative to graphite under ambient conditions, and glasses and amorphous materials that are kinetically trapped. In electronics, metastability describes indeterminate behavior of bistable circuits (e.g., flip-flops) when inputs violate timing constraints. In dynamical systems and ecology, metastable regimes can appear as long-lived transient patterns before a regime shift.

The lifetime of a metastable state depends on the height of the energy barrier and the rate of fluctuations (temperature, irradiation, mechanical disturbance). Controlling metastability is important in materials design, data storage, pharmaceuticals, and safety: stabilizing desirable metastable phases can yield useful properties, while unwanted metastability can lead to sudden failures. Experimental and theoretical approaches—nucleation theory, transition-state modeling, and kinetic simulations—are used to characterize and manipulate metastable behavior.