Related papers: Energy landscapes and their relation to thermodyna…
Nonanalyticities of thermodynamic functions are studied by adopting an approach based on stationary points of the potential energy. For finite systems, each stationary point is found to cause a nonanalyticity in the microcanonical entropy,…
The relation between saddle points of the potential of a classical many-particle system and the analyticity properties of its thermodynamic functions is studied. For finite systems, each saddle point is found to cause a nonanalyticity in…
Equilibrium phase transitions may be defined as nonanalytic points of thermodynamic functions, e.g., of the canonical free energy. Given a certain physical system, it is of interest to understand which properties of the system account for…
The stationary points of the potential energy function V are studied for the \phi^4 model on a two-dimensional square lattice with nearest-neighbor interactions. On the basis of analytical and numerical results, we explore the relation of…
In contrast to the canonical ensemble where thermodynamic functions are smooth for all finite system sizes, the microcanonical entropy can show nonanalytic points also for finite systems, even if the Hamiltonian is smooth. The relation…
The relation between saddle points of the potential of a classical many-particle system and the analyticity properties of its Boltzmann entropy is studied. For finite systems, each saddle point is found to cause a nonanalyticity in the…
We investigate the energy landscape of two- and three-dimensional XY models with nearest-neighbor interactions by analytically constructing several classes of stationary points of the Hamiltonian. These classes are analyzed, in particular…
The most complicated phenomena of equilibrium statistics, phase separations and transitions of various order and critical phenomena, can clearly and sharply be seen even for small systems in the topology of the curvature of the…
Many problems in physics, material sciences, chemistry and biology can be abstractly formulated as a system that navigates over a complex energy landscape of high or infinite dimensions. Well-known examples include phase transitions of…
The relation between thermodynamic phase transitions in classical systems and topology changes in their state space is discussed for systems in which equivalence of statistical ensembles does not hold. As an example, the spherical model…
In contrast to the canonical case, microcanonical thermodynamic functions can show nonanalyticities also for finite systems. In this paper we contribute to the understanding of these nonanalyticities by working out the relation between…
The extension of thermodynamic principles to active matter remains a challenge due to the non-equilibrium nature inherent to active systems. In this study, we introduce a framework to assess entropy in our minimal macroscopic experiment…
Based on the study of saddle points of the potential energy landscapes of generic classical many-particle systems, we present a necessary criterion for the occurrence of a thermodynamic phase transition. Remarkably, this criterion imposes…
We formally extend the energy landscape approach for the thermodynamics of liquids to account for saddle points. By considering the extensive nature of macroscopic potential energies, we derive the scaling behavior of saddles with system…
Energy landscapes are high-dimensional surfaces representing the dependence of system energy on variable configurations, which determine crucially the system's emergent behavior but are difficult to be analyzed due to their high-dimensional…
The understanding, and even the description of protein folding is impeded by the complexity of the process. Much of this complexity can be described and understood by taking a statistical approach to the energetics of protein conformation,…
When a liquid melt is cooled, a glass or phase transition can be obtained depending on the cooling rate. Yet, this behavior has not been clearly captured in energy landscape models. Here a model is provided in which two key ingredients are…
In the present work, we discuss how the functional form of thermodynamic observables can be deduced from the geometric properties of subsets of phase space. The geometric quantities taken into account are mainly extrinsic curvatures of the…
Microcanonical statistics can be well applied to non-extensive systems like nuclei, atomic clusters and systems at phase transitions of first order with inhomogeneous configurations like phase separation. No thermodynamic limit has to be…
We introduce a systematic classification method for the analogs of phase transitions in finite systems. This completely general analysis, which is applicable to any physical system and extends towards the thermodynamic limit, is based on…