Abstract
Martensitic transformations have long been considered most characteristically athermal — in the sense that they develop, with changing temperature, at a tremendous temperature-independent rate and cease to occur at isothermal conditions. Over the past decades, however, isothermal martensitic transformations (IMTs), which develop at low temperatures for a long time, have been discovered and studied. This review covers basic experimental data on IMT kinetics, discusses the way IMTs are affected by various influences, examines the current theoretical understanding of their nature, and looks at how they relate to kinetically different phase transformations and other thermally activated low-temperature processes in solids.