a b s t r a c tNatural cavitation is defined as the formation of vapor bubbles in a flow due to the pressure falling below the liquid's vapor pressure. The inception of the cavitation bubble is influenced by a lot of aspects, such as impurities, turbulence, liquid thermal properties, etc. In this paper, the exact difference method (EDM) and the Carnahan-Starling realgas equation of state (EOS) are coupled in the Shan-Chen multiphase lattice Boltzmann model, which is validated as being suitable for simulating high liquid/vapor density ratio multiphase flows. The 2D cavitation ''bubble'' growth is simulated under a quiescent and shear flow in the inception stage. Besides yielding the large density ratio, the realgas EOS also leads to apparently different compressibilities for liquid and vapor. The results agree with Rayleigh-Plesset predictions much better than those of a previous publication [X. Chen, Simulation of 2D cavitation bubble growth under shear flow by lattice Boltzmann model, Communications in Computational Physics 7 (2010) 212-223]. In the meantime, a comparison is conducted for single-bubble behavior under different shear rates, with reduced temperature T /T critical = 0.6891 and relaxation time τ = 1.0. The simulation results show that the cavitation bubble deformation is consistent with the bubble dynamics, D ∝ Ca, where D and Ca are the bubble deformation and the capillary number respectively. The shear rate hardly influences the bubble growth rate.