The nature of the temperature-driven transition of the 2D-Potts model in the lattice is studied, and the metastability associated with the transition. The problem was firstly investigated by Binder [1,2] in 1981, who discussed the ex- istence of metastable states in a temperature interval below the critial point, which is first-order for q > 4. The existence of such metastable states remains unclear. Starting from the droplet expansion theory for the 2D-Potts condensa- tion point (Meunier & Morel, 2000 [3]), we compare the metastability derived from the theory with the dynamic metastability found with a local dynamics. In agreement with the droplet expansion, our analysis unveals a vanishing of the metastable interval in the limit of large system area. This is interpreted in terms of the microscopic mechanism of nucleation and compared with Classical Nucleation Theory.

1 Binder, J. Stat. Phys. 24, 69 (1981). 2 see references in Ib´a˜nez, M., Loreto, V. and Petri, A., submitted to Phys. Rev. E. Preprint: arXiv:0706.3534. 3 Meunier, J. L. and Morel, A., Eur. Phys. J. B 13, 341 (2000).