  Vapor bubbles are formed in liquids by two mechanisms: evaporation
(temperature above the boiling threshold) and cavitation (pressure below the
vapor pressure). The liquid resists in these metastable (overheating and
tensile, respectively) states for a long time since bubble nucleation is an
activated process that needs to surmount the free energy barrier separating the
liquid and the vapor states. The bubble nucleation rate is difficult to assess
and, typically, only for extremely small systems treated at atomistic level of
detail. In this work a powerful approach, based on a continuum diffuse
interface modeling of the two-phase fluid embedded with thermal fluctuations
(Fluctuating Hydrodynamics) is exploited to study the nucleation process in
homogeneous conditions, evaluating the bubble nucleation rates and following
the long term dynamics of the metastable system, up to the bubble coalescence
and expansion stages. In comparison with more classical approaches, this
methodology allows on the one hand to deal with much larger systems observed
for a much longer times than possible with even the most advanced atomistic
models. On the other it extends contin- uum formulations to thermally activated
processes, impossible to deal with in a purely determinist setting.
