Related papers: Phase transitions in general gravity theories
It is pointed out that phase structures of gauge theories compactified on non-simply connected spaces are not trivial. As a demonstration, an SU(2) gauge model on $M^3\otimes S^1$ is studied and is shown to possess three phases: Hosotani,…
During the past two decades, cosmologists turned to particle physics in order to explore the physics of the very early Universe. The main link between the physics of the smallest and largest structures in the Universe is the idea of…
A fundamental problem with attempting to quantize general relativity is its perturbative non-renormalizability. However, this fact does not rule out the possibility that non-perturbative effects can be computed, at least in some…
We discuss recent progress (and controversies) in the theory of finite temperature phase transitions. This includes the structure of the effective potential at a finite temperature, the infrared problem in quantum statistics of gauge…
We summarise the physics of first-order phase transitions in the early universe, and the possible ways in which they might come about. We then focus on gravitational waves, emphasising general qualitative features of stochastic backgrounds…
The liquid-gas phase transition in finite nuclei is studied in a heated liquid-drop model where the drop is assumed to be in thermodynamic equilibrium with the vapour emanated from it. Changing pressure along the liquid-gas coexistence line…
In this work, we revisit a toy model proposed by Camanho {\it et.al.} [JHEP 10 (2015) 179] and extensively study the possible existence of gravitational phase transition from AdS to dS geometries by adding the Maxwell field as an impurity…
First-order phase transitions produce gravitational waves and primordial black holes. They always occur in field theories where symmetries are radiatively broken and masses are correspondingly generated. These theories predict a period of…
In this Letter, we numerically present the possibility of the first-order phase transition occurring through the thermal fluctuation in the early universe. We find that when the temperature is slightly higher than the mass scale of the…
Many quantum condensed-matter systems, and probably the quantum vacuum of our Universe, are strongly correlated and strongly interacting fermionic systems, which cannot be treated perturbatively. However, physics which emerges in the…
We initiate a study of the gravitational-wave signatures of a phase transition that occurs as the Universe's temperature increases during reheating. The gravitational-wave signatures of such a heating phase transition are different from…
The equilibrium properties of classical self-gravitating systems in the grand canonical ensemble are studied by using the correspondence with an euclidean field theory with infrared and ultraviolet cutoffs. It is shown that the system…
Quantum phase transitions are sudden changes in the ground-state wavefunction of a many-body system that can occur as a control parameter such as a concentration or a field strength is varied. They are driven purely by the competition…
Phase transitions are studied in $M$-theory and $F$-theory. In $M$-theory compactification to five dimensions on a Calabi-Yau, there are topology-changing transitions similar to those seen in conformal field theory, but the non-geometrical…
We study phase transitions in $SU(\infty)$ gauge theories at nonzero temperature using matrix models. Our basic assumption is that the effective potential is dominated by double trace terms for the Polyakov loops. As a function of the…
(2+1) dimensional gravity is equivalent to an exactly soluble non-Abelian Chern-Simons gauge field theory (E Witten 1988). Regarding this as the topological phase of quantum gravity in (2+1)d, we suggest a topological symmetry breaking by…
These lecture notes provide a relatively self-contained introduction to field theoretic methods employed in the study of classical and quantum phase transitions.
A sweep through a quantum phase transition by means of a time-dependent external parameter (e.g., pressure) entails non-equilibrium phenomena associated with a break-down of adiabaticity: At the critical point, the energy gap vanishes and…
The traditional concept of phase transitions has, in recent years, been widened in a number of interesting ways. The concept of a topological phase transition separating phases with a different ground state topology, rather than phases of…
Critical transitions, or large changes in the state of a system after a small change in the system's external conditions or parameters, commonly occur in a wide variety of disciplines, from the biological and social sciences to physics.…