Related papers: eta/s is critical (at phase transitions)
Small changes in an external parameter can often lead to dramatic qualitative changes in the lowest energy quantum mechanical ground state of a correlated electron system. In anisotropic crystals, such as the high temperature…
Heavy ion collisions at large baryon density may exhibit a first order phase transition from a chirally symmetric phase to the symmetry broken ground state. This should then lead to large density inhomogeneities, which affect the relative…
We address a discrepancy between different computations of $\eta/s$ (shear viscosity over entropy density) of hadronic matter. Substantial deviations of this coefficient are found between transport approaches mainly based on resonance…
We applied the exact Andreev soft-wall holographic model to investigate phase transitions in rotating strongly interacting matter at high and low densities. Using the dual description of hadronic matter and quark-gluon plasma via thermal…
We analyze the phase diagram of N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory with fundamental matter in the presence of a background magnetic field and nonzero baryon number. We identify an isolated quantum critical point separating two differently…
The pattern of isentropes in the vicinity of a first-order phase transition is proposed as a key for a sub-classification. While the confinement--deconfinement transition, conjectured to set in beyond a critical end point in the QCD phase…
We use the available two different self-consistent formulations of quasiparticle models and extend their applications for the description of quark gluon plasma (QGP) at non-vanishing baryon chemical potentials. The thermodynamical…
We derive an expression relating the transport parameter $\hat{q}$ and the shear viscosity $\eta$ of a weakly coupled quark-gluon plasma. A deviation from this relation can be regarded as a quantitative measure of ``strong coupling'' of the…
Event-by-event fluctuations of hadronic patterns in heavy-ion collisions are studied in search for signatures of quark-hadron phase transition. Attention is focused on a narrow strip in the azimuthal angle with small $\Delta y$. The…
It is shown how to embed a critical point in a smooth background equation of state so as to yield the critical exponents and critical amplitude ratios expected of a transition in the same universality class as the liquid-gas phase…
We consider spin-half quantum antiferromagnets in two spatial dimensions in the quantum limit, where the spins are in a valence bond solid (VBS) phase. The transitions between two such VBS phases is studied. In some cases, an interesting…
We study finite temperature transport in the Luttinger-Abrikosov-Beneslavskii phase -- an interacting, scale invariant, non-Fermi liquid phase found in quadratic semimetals. We develop a kinetic equation formalism to describe the d.c.…
The remarkably small shear viscosity to entropy density ratio $\eta/s < 0.5$ of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is a key insight from heavy ion experiments. Nonetheless, the basic understanding of this `observable' still seems to be…
Despite its fully unitary dynamics, the bosonic Kitaev chain (BKC) displays key hallmarks of non-Hermitian physics including non-reciprocal transport and the non-Hermitian skin effect. Here we demonstrate another remarkable phenomena: the…
An extension of the relativistic density functional approach to the equation of state for strongly interacting matter is suggested which generalizes a recently developed modified excluded-volume mechanism to the case of temperature and…
Ambiguities regarding the physics and the existence of the critical point (CP) on the QCD phase boundary still exist and the mist regarding the conjectured QCD phase boundary has not yet cleared. In this paper we extend our earlier study…
A hydrodynamic + cascade model of relativistic heavy ion collisions is presented and compared to available hadronic data from the SPS to RHIC. The model consistently reproduces the radial and elliptic flow data for different particles,…
We study second order phase transitions in non-conformal holographic models of gauge theory/string theory correspondence at finite temperature and zero chemical potential. We compute critical exponents of the bulk viscosity near the…
We measure the static shear viscosity $\eta$ in a two-component Fermi gas near a broad collisional (Feshbach) resonance, as a function of interaction strength and energy. We find that $\eta$ has both a quadratic and a linear dependence on…
It is discussed how phase transitions of first order (with phase separation and surface tension), continuous transitions and (multi)-critical points can be defined and classified for finite systems from the topology of the energy surface…